She’d been lying in the hammock reading poetry for over an hour. It wasn’t easy: she was thinking all the while about George coming back with Cecil, and she kept sliding down, in small half-willing surrenders, till she was in a heap, with the book held tiringly above her face. Now the light was going, and the words began to hide among themselves on the page. She wanted to get a look at Cecil, to drink him in for a minute before he saw her, and was introduced, and asked her what she was reading. But he must have missed his train, or at least his connection: she saw him pacing the long platform at Harrow and Wealdstone, and rather regretting he’d come. Five minutes later, as the sunset sky turned pink above the rockery, it began to seem possible that something worse had happened. With sudden grave excitement she pictured the arrival of a telegram, and the news being passed round; imagined weeping pretty wildly; then saw herself describing the occasion to someone, many years later, though still without quite deciding what the news had been.
In the sitting-room the lamps were being lit, and through the open window she could hear her mother talking to Mrs Kalbeck, who had come to tea, and who tended to stay, having no one to get back for. The glow across the path made the garden suddenly lonelier. Daphne slipped out of the hammock, put on her shoes, and forgot about her books. She started towards the house, but something in the time of day held her, with its hint of a mystery she had so far overlooked: it drew her down the lawn, past the rockery, where the pond that reflected the trees in silhouette had grown as deep as the white sky. It was the long still moment when the hedges and borders turned dusky and vague, but anything she looked at closely, a rose, a begonia, a glossy laurel leaf, seemed to give itself back to the day with a secret throb of colour.
She heard a faint familiar sound, the knock of the broken gate against the post at the bottom of the garden; and then an unfamiliar voice, with an edge to it, and then George’s laugh. He must have brought Cecil the other way, through the Priory and the woods. Daphne ran up the narrow half-hidden steps in the rockery and from the top she could just make them out in the spinney below. She couldn’t really hear what they were saying, but she was disconcerted by Cecil’s voice; it seemed so quickly and decisively to take control of their garden and their house and the whole of the coming weekend. It was an excitable voice that seemed to say it didn’t care who heard it, but in its tone there was also something mocking and superior. She looked back at the house, the dark mass of the roof and the chimney-stacks against the sky, the lamp-lit windows under low eaves, and thought about Monday, and the life they would pick up again very readily after Cecil had gone.
Under the trees the dusk was deeper, and their little wood seemed interestingly larger. The boys were dawdling, for all Cecil’s note of impatience. Their pale clothes, the rim of George’s boater, caught the failing light as they moved slowly between the birch-trunks, but their faces were hard to make out. George had stopped and was poking at something with his foot, Cecil, taller, standing close beside him, as if to share his view of it. She went cautiously towards them, and it took her a moment to realize that they were quite unaware of her; she stood still, smiling awkwardly, let out an anxious gasp, and then, mystified and excited, began to explore her position. She knew that Cecil was a guest and too grown-up to play a trick on, though George was surely in her power. But having the power, she couldn’t think what to do with it. Now Cecil had his hand on George’s shoulder, as if consoling him, though he was laughing too, more quietly than before; the curves of their two hats nudged and overlapped. She thought there was something nice in Cecil’s laugh, after all, a little whinny of good fun, even if, as so often, she was not included in the joke. Then Cecil raised his head and saw her and said, ‘Oh, hello!’ as if they’d already met several times and enjoyed it.
George was confused for a second, peered at her as he quickly buttoned his jacket, and said, ‘Cecil missed his train,’ rather sharply.
‘Well, clearly,’ said Daphne, who chose a certain dryness of tone against the constant queasy likelihood of being teased.
‘And then of course I had to see Middlesex,’ said Cecil, coming forward and shaking her hand. ‘We seem to have tramped over much of the county.’
‘He brought you the country way,’ said Daphne. ‘There’s the country way, and the suburban way, which doesn’t create such a fine impression. You just go straight up Stanmore Hill.’
George wheezed with embarrassment, and also a kind of relief. ‘There, Cess, you’ve met my sister.’
Cecil’s hand, hot and hard, was still gripping hers, in a frank, convivial way. It was a large hand, and somehow unfeeling; a hand more used to gripping oars and ropes than the slender fingers of sixteen-year-old girls. She took in his smell, of sweat and grass, the sourness of his breath. When she started to pull her fingers out, he squeezed again, for a second or two, before releasing her. She didn’t like the sensation, but in the minute that followed she found that her hand held the memory of his hand, and half-wanted to reach out through the shadows and touch it again.
‘I was reading poetry,’ she said, ‘but I’m afraid it grew too dark to see.’
‘Ah!’ said Cecil, with his quick high laugh, that was almost a snigger; but she sensed he was looking at her kindly. In the late dusk they had to peer closely to be sure of each other’s expressions; it made them seem particularly interested in each other. ‘Which poet?’
She had Tennyson’s poems, and also the Granta, with three of Cecil’s own poems in it, ‘Corley’, ‘Dawn at Corley’ and ‘Corley: Dusk’. She said, ‘Oh, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.’
Cecil nodded slowly and seemed amused by searching for the kind and lively thing to say. ‘Do you find he still holds up?’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Daphne firmly, and then wondered if she’d understood the question. She glanced between the lines of trees, but with a sense of other shadowy perspectives, the kind of Cambridge talk that George often treated them to, where things were insisted on that couldn’t possibly be meant. It was a refinement of teasing, where you were never told why your answer was wrong. ‘We all love Tennyson here,’ she said, ‘at “Two Acres”.’
Now Cecil’s eyes seemed very playful, under the broad peak of his cap. ‘Then I can see we shall get on,’ he said. ‘Let’s all read out our favourite poems – if you like to read aloud.’
‘Oh yes!’ said Daphne, excited already, though she’d never heard Hubert read out anything except a letter in The Times that he agreed with. ‘Which is your favourite?’ she said, with a moment’s worry that she wouldn’t have heard of it.
Cecil smiled at them both, savouring his power of choice, and said, ‘Well, you’ll find out when I read it to you.’
‘I hope it’s not “The Lady of Shalott”,’ said Daphne.
‘Oh, I like “The Lady of Shalott”.’
‘I mean, that’s my favourite,’ said Daphne.
George said, ‘Well, come up and meet Mother,’ spreading his arms to shepherd them.
‘And Mrs Kalbeck’s here too,’ said Daphne, ‘by the way.’
‘Then we’ll try and get rid of her,’ said George.
‘Well, you can try…’ said Daphne.
‘I’m already feeling sorry for Mrs Kalbeck,’ said Cecil, ‘whoever she may be.’
‘She’s a big black beetle,’ said George, ‘who took Mother to Germany last year, and hasn’t let go of her since.’
‘She’s a German widow,’ said Daphne, with a note of sad realism and a pitying shake of the head. She found Cecil had spread his arms too and, hardly thinking, she did the same; for a moment they seemed united in a lightly rebellious pact.
While the maid was removing the tea-things, Freda Sawle stood up and wandered between the small tables and numerous little armchairs to the open window. A few high streaks of cloud glowed pink above the rockery, and the garden itself was stilled in the first grey of the twilight. It was a time of day that played uncomfortably on her feelings. ‘I suppose my child is straining her eyes out there somewhere,’ she said, turning back to the warmer light of the room.
‘If she has her poetry books,’ said Clara Kalbeck.
‘She’s been studying some of Cecil Valance’s poems. She says they are very fine, but not so good as Swinburne or Lord Tennyson.’
‘Swinburne…’ said Mrs Kalbeck, with a wary chuckle.
‘All the poems of Cecil’s that I’ve seen have been about his own house. Though George says he has others, of more general interest.’
‘I feel I know a good deal about Cecil Valance’s house,’ said Clara, with the slight asperity that gave even her nicest remarks an air of sarcasm.
Freda paced the short distance to the musical end of the room, the embrasure with the piano and the dark cabinet of the gramophone. George himself had turned rather critical of ‘Two Acres’ since his visit to Corley Court. He said it had a way of ‘resolving itself into nooks’. This nook had its own little window, and was spanned by a broad oak beam. ‘They’re very late,’ said Freda; ‘though George says Cecil is hopeless about time.’
Clara looked tolerantly at the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘I think perhaps they are rambling around.’
‘Oh, who knows what George is doing with him!’ said Freda, and frowned at her own sharp tone.
‘He may have lost his connection at Harrow and Wealdstone,’ said Clara.
‘Quite so,’ said Freda; and for a moment the two names, with the pinched vowels, the throaty r, the blurred W that was almost an F, struck her as a tiny emblem of her friend’s claim on England, and Stanmore, and her. She stopped to make adjustments to the framed photographs that stood in an expectant half-circle on a small round table. Dear Frank, in a studio setting, with his hand on another small round table. Hubert in a rowing-boat and George on a pony. She pushed the two of them apart, to give Daphne more prominence. Often she was glad of Clara’s company, and her unselfconscious willingness to sit, for long hours at a time. She was no less good a friend for being a pitiful one. Freda had three children, the telephone, and an upstairs bathroom; Clara had none of these amenities, and it was hard to begrudge her when she laboured up the hill from damp little ‘Lorelei’ in search of talk. Tonight, though, with dinner raising tensions in the kitchen, her staying-put showed a certain insensitivity.
‘One can see George is so happy to be having his friend,’ said Clara.
‘I know,’ said Freda, sitting down again with a sudden return of patience. ‘And of course I’m happy too. Before, he never seemed to have anybody.’
‘Perhaps losing a father made him shy,’ said Clara. ‘He wanted only to be with you.’
‘Mm, you may be right,’ said Freda, piqued by Clara’s wisdom, and touched at the same time by the thought of George’s devotion. ‘But he’s certainly changing now. I can see it in his walk. And he whistles a great deal, which usually shows that a man’s looking forward to something… Of course he loves Cambridge. He loves the life of ideas.’ She saw the paths across and around the courts of the colleges as ideas, with the young men following them, through archways, and up staircases. Beyond were the gardens and river-banks, the hazy dazzle of social freedom, where George and his friends stretched out on the grass, or slipped by in punts. She said cautiously, ‘You know he has been elected to the Conversazione Society.’
‘Indeed…’ said Clara, with a vague shake of the head.
‘We’re not allowed to know about it. But it’s philosophy, I think. Cecil Valance got him into it. They discuss ideas. I think George said they discuss, “Does this hearth-rug exist?” That kind of thing.’
‘The big questions,’ said Clara.
Freda laughed guiltily and said, ‘I understand it’s a great honour to be a member.’
‘And Cecil is older than George,’ said Clara.
‘I believe two or three years older, and already quite an expert on some aspect of the Indian Mutiny. Apparently he hopes to be a Fellow of the college.’
‘He is offering to help George.’
‘Well, I think they’re great friends!’
Clara let a moment pass. ‘Whatever the reason,’ she said, ‘George is blooming.’
Freda smiled firmly, as she took up her friend’s idea. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘He’s coming into bloom, at last!’ The image was both beautiful and vaguely unsettling. Then Daphne was sticking her head through the window and shouting,
‘They’re here!’ – sounding furious with them for not knowing.
‘Ah, good,’ said her mother, standing up again.
‘Not a moment too soon,’ said Clara Kalbeck, with a dry laugh, as if her own patience had been tried by the wait.
Daphne glanced quickly over her shoulder, before saying, ‘He’s extremely charming, you know, but he has a rather carrying voice.’
‘And so have you, my dear,’ said Freda. ‘Now do go and bring him in.’
‘I shall depart,’ said Clara, quietly and gravely.
‘Oh, nonsense,’ said Freda, surrendering as she had suspected she would, and getting up and going into the hall. As it happened Hubert had just got home from work, and was standing at the front door in his bowler hat, almost throwing two brown suitcases into the house. He said,
‘I brought these up with me in the van.’
‘Oh, they must be Cecil’s,’ said Freda. ‘Yes, “C. T. V.”, look. Do be careful…’ Her elder son was a well-built boy, with a surprisingly ruddy moustache, but she saw in a moment, in the light of her latest conversation, that he hadn’t yet bloomed, and would surely be completely bald before he had had the chance. She said, ‘And a most intriguing packet has come for you. Good evening, Hubert.’
‘Good evening, Mother,’ said Hubert, leaning over the cases to kiss her on the cheek. It was the little dry comedy of their relations, which somehow turned on the fact that Hubert wasn’t lightly amused, perhaps didn’t even know there was anything comic about them. ‘Is this it?’ he said, picking up a small parcel wrapped in shiny red paper. ‘It looks more like a lady’s thing.’
‘Well, so I had hoped,’ said his mother, ‘it’s from Mappin’s-’ as behind her, where the garden door had stood open all day, the others were arriving: waiting a minute outside, in the soft light that spread across the path, George and Cecil arm in arm, gleaming against the dusk, and Daphne just behind, wide-eyed, with a part in the drama, the person who had found them. Freda had a momentary sense of Cecil leading George, rather than George presenting his friend; and Cecil himself, crossing the threshold in his pale linen clothes, with only his hat in his hand, seemed strangely unencumbered. He might have been coming in from his own garden.
Up in the spare bedroom, Jonah settled the first suitcase on the bed, and ran his hands over the smooth hard leather; in the centre of the lid the initials C. T. V. were stamped in faded gold. He shifted and sighed in his private quandary, alert to the sound of the guest in the house. They were making each other laugh, down below, and the noise came upstairs without the sense. He heard Cecil Valance’s laugh, like a dog shut in a room, and pictured him again in the hall, in his cream-coloured jacket with grass stains on the elbows. He had lively dark eyes and high colour, as though he’d been running. Mr George had called him Cess – Jonah said it in a noiseless whisper as he traced the C with the tip of his finger. Then he stood up straight, sprang the catches, and released the heady and authentic gentleman’s smell: toilet water, starch, and the slowly fading reek of leather.
As a rule, Jonah only came upstairs to carry cases or shift a bed; and last winter, his first at ‘Two Acres’, he had brought the coals up for the fires. He was fifteen, short for his age, but strong; he chopped wood, ran errands, went up and down to the station in Horner’s van. He was the boy, in all the useful senses of the word, but he had never ‘valeted’ before. George and Hubert seemed able to dress and undress by themselves, and Mustow, Mrs Sawle’s maid, took down all the laundry. This morning, however, George had called him in after breakfast and told him to look after his friend Valance, who he said was used to any number of servants. At Corley Court he had a marvellous man called Wilkes, who had looked after George as well when he stayed there, and given him some good advice without appearing to do so. Jonah asked what sort of advice it had been, but George laughed and said, ‘Just find out if he needs anything. Unpack his bags as soon as he comes, and, you know, arrange the contents convincingly.’ This was the word, enormous but elusive, that Jonah had had on his mind all day, sometimes displaced by some other task, then gripping him again with a subtle horror.
Now he unbuckled straps and lifted tissue-paper with hesitant fingers. Though he needed help, he was glad he was alone. The case had been packed by some expert servant, by Wilkes himself perhaps, and seemed to Jonah to call for some similar skill in the unpacking. There was an evening suit with two waistcoats, one black and one fancy, and then under the tissue-paper three dress-shirts and a round leather box for the collars. Jonah saw himself in the wardrobe mirror as he carried the clothes across the room, and saw his shadow, from the lamp on the bedside table, go rearing across the slope of the ceiling. George said Wilkes had done a particular thing, which was to take away all his loose change when he arrived and wash it for him. Jonah wondered how he was going to get the change off Cecil without asking for it or appearing to steal it. It occurred to him that George might possibly have been joking, but with George these days, as even Mrs Sawle had said, it was hard to tell.
In the second case there were clothes for cricket and swimming, and a number of soft, coloured shirts which Jonah thought were unusual. He spaced them out equally on the available shelves, like a display in a draper’s. Then there was the body linen, fine as a lady’s, the drawers ivory-coloured, vaguely shiny, catching on the roughness of his thumb before he stroked them flat again. He listened for a moment for the tone of the talk downstairs, then took the chance he had been given to unfold a pair and hold them up against his round young face so that the light glowed through them. The pulse of excitement beating under his anxiety made the blood rush into his head.
The lid of the case was heavy; it had two wide pockets in it, closed with press-studs, and holding books and papers. Jonah took these out with a little more confidence, knowing from George that his guest was a writing man. He himself could write neatly, and could read almost anything, given the time. The handwriting, in the first book Jonah opened, was very bad, and ran uphill at an angle, with the gs and ys tangling the lines together. This appeared to be a diary. Another book, rubbed at the corners like the cash-book in the kitchen, had what must be poems in it. ‘Oh do not smile on me if at the last’ Jonah made out, the words quite large, but then after a few lines, where the crossing-out began, getting smaller and scratchier, sloping away across the page until they were crowded and climbing over each other in the bottom right-hand corner. There were dog-eared bits of paper tucked in, and an envelope addressed to ‘Cecil Valance Esqre, King’s College’ in the careful writing which he knew at once to be George’s. He heard rapid steps on the stairs and Cecil calling out, ‘Hallo, which is my room?’
‘In here, sir,’ said Jonah, pushing the letter back and quickly squaring up the books on the table.
‘Aha, are you my man?’ said Cecil, suddenly possessing the room.
‘Yes, I am, sir,’ said Jonah, with a momentary sense of betrayal.
‘I shan’t need you much,’ Cecil said, ‘in fact you can leave me alone in the morning,’ taking off his jacket at once and passing it to Jonah, who hung it up in the wardrobe without touching on the stained elbows. He planned to come back later, when they were having dinner, and deal with the dirty clothes unseen. He was going to be very much involved with all Cecil’s things until Monday morning. ‘Now, what shall I call you?’ said Cecil, almost as if choosing from a list in his head.
‘I’m Jonah, sir.’
‘Jonah, eh…?’ The name sometimes led to remarks, and Jonah started rearranging the books on the table, unsure if they showed in some way that he’d looked inside them. After a moment Cecil said,‘Now those are my poetry notebooks. You must make sure you never touch them.’
‘Very well, sir,’ said Jonah. ‘Did you want them unpacked, then?’
‘Yes, yes, that’s all right,’ said Cecil fair-mindedly. He tugged his tie off, and started unbuttoning his shirt. ‘Been with the family long?’
‘Since last Christmas, sir.’
Cecil smiled vaguely, as if he’d forgotten the question by the time it was answered, and said, ‘Funny little room, isn’t it.’ Since Jonah didn’t answer, he added, ‘Rather charming, though, rather charming,’ with his yap of a laugh. Jonah had the strange feeling of being intimate with someone who was simultaneously unaware of him. In a way it was what you looked for, as a servant. But he had never been kept in talk in any of the other, smaller, bedrooms. He peered respectfully at the floor, feeling he mustn’t be caught looking at Cecil’s naked shoulders and chest. Now Cecil took out the change from his pocket and slapped it on the wash-stand; Jonah glanced at it and bit his cheek. ‘And will you run me a bath,’ said Cecil, undoing his belt and wriggling his hips to make his trousers fall down.
‘Yes, sir,’ said Jonah, ‘at once, sir,’ and slipped past him with a pang of relief.
Hubert forwent his bath that evening, and had what he felt was an unsatisfactory wash in his room. He wanted their guest to admire the house, and took some pleasure in hearing the tremendous splashes coming from next door; but he frowned as well, as he tied his tie in the mirror, at the virtual certainty that the sacrifice of his own half-hour in the tub would go unrecognized.
Having some time to spare, he went downstairs to the gloomy little room by the front door, which had been his father’s office, and where Hubert too liked to write his letters. In truth he had very little private correspondence, and was dimly aware of not having the knack of it. When there was a letter to write, he did it with businesslike promptness. Now he sat down at the oak desk, fished his new gift from his dinner-jacket pocket, and laid it on the blotter with faint unease.
He took a sheet of headed paper from a drawer, dipped his pen in the pewter ink-well and wrote, in a rolling, backward-leaning hand:
My dear old Harry -
I can never thank you enough for the silver cigarette case. It’s an absolute ripper, Harry old boy. I have told no one about it yet but will hand it round after dinner & just watch their faces! You are too generous, I’m sure no one ever had such a friend Harry. Well, it is nearly dinner-time, & we have a young friend of George’s staying, a poet! You will meet him tomorrow, when you come over, he looks the part I must say though I have read not a word from his pen! Tons of thanks, Harry old boy, & best love from yours ever,
Hubert.
Hubert turned the paper over on the blotter and thumped it tenderly with his fist. By writing large he had got the final few words on to the third side of the small folded sheet, which was a sign one hadn’t merely written dutifully; the letter ran on pleasantly, and reading it over again he felt satisfied with the touches of humour. He tucked it into an envelope, wrote ‘Harry Hewitt Esq., Mattocks, Harrow Weald’ and ‘By Hand’ in the corner, and placed it on the tray in the hall for Jonah to take over in the morning. He stood looking at it for a moment, struck by the solemn rightness of living just here, and of Harry living where he did, and of letters passing between them with such noble efficiency.
George was the last to come down, and even so he stopped on the stairs for a minute. They were almost ready. He saw the housemaid cross the hall with a salt-cellar, caught the odour of cooked fish, heard Cecil’s high overriding laugh, and felt the chill of his own act of daring, bringing this man into his mother’s house. Then he thought of what Cecil had said to him in the park, in the half-hour they had made for themselves by pretending he’d missed his train, and felt his scalp, his shoulders, his whole spine prickle under the sweeping, secret promise. He tiptoed down and slipped into the drawing-room with a nearly dizzy-making sense of the dangers ahead. ‘Ah, George,’ murmured his mother, with a hint of reproach; he shrugged and smirked slightly as if his only offence had been to keep them waiting. Hubert, with his back to the empty grate, had ensnared them all in talk about local transport. ‘So you were stranded at Harrow and Wealdstone, eh?’ He beamed over his raised champagne glass, as proud of the rigours of life in Stanmore as he was of the blessings.
‘Didn’t matter a bit,’ said Cecil, catching George’s eye and smiling curiously.
‘As a wit once said, it sounds like some medieval torture. Harrow and wealdstone – can’t you just see it!’
‘Oh, spare me the wealdstone!’ said Daphne.
‘We’re devoted to Harrow and Wealdstone, whatever a wit may have said,’ said his mother.
George stood for a moment with his hand pressed flat against Cecil’s lower back and gazed into his friend’s glass. He wiggled his fingers to play the secret notes of apology and promise. ‘Well the Valance motto,’ Cecil said, ‘is “Seize the Day”. We were brought up not to waste time. You’d be amazed what one can find to do, even at a suburban railway station.’ He gave them all his happiest smile, and when Daphne said, ‘What sort of things do you mean?’ he carried on smiling as if he hadn’t heard her.
‘I gather you came up through the Priory,’ said Hubert, genially determined to follow every step of his journey.
‘Yes, indeed we did,’ said Cecil, very smoothly.
‘You know Queen Adelaide used to live there,’ said Hubert, with a quick frown to show he didn’t want to make a big thing of it.
‘So I gather,’ said Cecil, his glass empty already.
‘Later I believe it was a very excellent hotel,’ said Mrs Kalbeck.
‘And now a school,’ said Hubert, with a bleak little snuffle.
‘A sad fate!’ said Daphne.
Jesus Christ! thought George, though all he came out with as he crossed the room was a sort of distracted chuckle. He poured himself the last of the bottle of Pommery, and glanced into the window, where the lamplit room was reflected, idealized and doubled in size, spread invitingly across the dark garden. His hand was trembling, and he kept his back to them as he picked up the fullish glass, steadying it with the other hand. It was impossible to imagine such a weakness in Cecil, and a consciousness of this added subtly to George’s shame. He turned and looked at them, and they seemed all to be looking at him, as if they had gathered at his request, and were waiting for his explanation. All he had intended was a quiet family supper, to introduce his friend. Of course he hadn’t reckoned on old Kalbeck, who seemed to think ‘Two Acres’ itself was a hotel – it was really the limit how she’d fished, in her cunning oblivious way, for an invitation to stay on, his mother magnanimously lending her a wrap and dabbing her in her own familiar Coty scent. Now he watched with horror as she questioned Cecil about the Dolomites, her head on one side; her great brown teeth made her smiles both gauche and menacing. But a minute or two later Cecil was yarning with her in German, and almost making a virtue of her presence. Cecil, of course, lived in Berkshire: there was little danger of Frau Kalbeck turning up just before meals at Corley Court. He spoke German nicely, keeping an amused pedantic eye on the slowly approaching end of his sentences. When the maid announced dinner, Mrs Kalbeck made it seem like an unexpected intrusion on their happy meeting of minds.
‘Will you sit here, Mrs Kalbeck,’ Hubert was saying, standing by his chair at the head of the table and smiling thinly as he watched them find their places. George smiled too, a little disconcerted from his glass of champagne. He felt a twinge of shame and regret at having no father, and forever having to make do. Perhaps it was just the memory of Corley, with its enormous oriental dining-room, that made the present party seem cramped and airless. Cecil stooped as he entered the room, in a possibly unconscious gesture to the cosiness of scale at ‘Two Acres’. A father like Cecil’s set a reassuring tone for a dinner, being very rich and an authority on shorthorn cattle. He had immense grey side-whiskers, brushed outwards, and themselves like a pair of brushes. Hubert was twenty-two, and wore a soft red moustache; he went to an office every day by train. This of course was what their own father had done, and George tried to picture him in Hubert’s chair, ten years older than when he’d seen him last; but the image was blurred and unavailing, like any much-handled memory, the pale blue eyes soon lost among the flowers and candles crowding the table.
Even so, his mother was very pretty, and really a great beauty compared to Lady Valance, ‘The General’, as Cecil and his brother called her, or sometimes ‘The Iron Duke’, on account of her very faint resemblance to the first Duke of Wellington. Tonight Freda was wearing her amethyst drops, and her red-gold hair seemed to glimmer, like the candle-lit wine in her glass. The General naturally was a strict teetotaller – and now George wondered if Cecil himself had been shocked to see his hostess drinking before dinner? Well, he’d have to get used to it. They were doing things in their best festive style for him, the napkins belaboured into lilies, the small silver items, bowls and boxes of uncertain use, polished up and set down between the glasses and candle-sticks. George reached forward and moved slightly to the left a vase of white roses and trailing ivy that obstructed his view of Cecil opposite. Cecil held his eye for a long moment – he felt the jolt of simultaneous danger and reassurance pass through him. Then he watched his friend blink slowly and turn to answer Daphne on his right.
‘Do you have jelly-mould domes?’ she wanted to know.
‘At Corley?’ said Cecil. ‘As a matter of fact, we do.’ He said the word ‘Corley’ as other men said ‘England’ or ‘The King’, with reverent briskness and simple confidence in his cause.
‘What are they,’ Daphne said, ‘exactly?’
‘Well, they’re perfectly extraordinary,’ said Cecil, unfolding his lily, ‘though not I suppose strictly domes.’
‘They’re sort of little compartments in the ceiling, aren’t they,’ said George, feeling rather silly to have bragged to the family about them.
Hubert murmured abstractedly and stared at the parlourmaid, who had been brought in to help the housemaid serve dinner, and was taking round bread-rolls, setting each one on its plate with a tiny gasp of relief.
‘I imagine they’re painted in fairly gaudy colours?’ Daphne said.
‘Really, child,’ said her mother.
Cecil looked drolly across the table. ‘They’re red and gold, I think – aren’t they, Georgie?’
Daphne sighed and watched the golden soup swim from the ladle into Cecil’s bowl. ‘I wish we had jelly-mould domes,’ she said. ‘Or compartments.’
‘They might look somewhat amiss here, old girl,’ said George, pulling a face at the oak beams low overhead, ‘in the Arts and Crafts ambience of 2A.’
‘I do wish you wouldn’t,’ said his mother. ‘You make us sound like a flat above a shop.’
Cecil smiled uncertainly, and said to Daphne, ‘Well, you must come to Corley and see them for yourself.’
‘There, Daphne!’ said her mother, in reproach and triumph.
‘Do you have brothers and sisters?’ asked Mrs Kalbeck, perhaps already envisaging the visit.
‘There are only two of us, I’m afraid,’ said Cecil.
‘Cecil has a younger brother,’ said George.
‘Is he called Dudley?’ said Daphne.
‘He is,’ Cecil admitted.
‘I believe he’s very handsome,’ said Daphne, with new confidence.
George was appalled to find himself blushing. ‘Well…’ said Cecil, taking a first moody sip of soup, but, thank heavens, not looking at him. In fact anyone would have said that Dudley was extremely good-looking, but George was ashamed to hear his own words repeated back to Cecil. ‘A younger brother can be something of a bane,’ Cecil said.
Hubert nodded and laughed and sat back as if he’d made a joke himself.
‘Dud’s awfully satirical, wouldn’t you say, Georgie?’ Cecil went on, giving him a sly look over the white roses.
‘He works on your mother’s patience,’ said George with a sigh, as though he’d known the family for years, and aware too that this repeated ‘Georgie’, never used by his own family, was showing him to them in a novel light.
‘Is your brother at Cambridge also?’ asked George’s mother.
‘No, he’s at Oxford, thank heavens.’
‘Oh, really, which college?’
‘Now, which one is it?’ said Cecil. ‘I think it’s called something like… Balliol?’
‘That certainly is one of the Oxford colleges,’ said Hubert.
‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said Cecil. George sniggered and gazed with nervous admiration at his pondering face, above the high starched collar and lustrous black tie, the sparkle of his dress-studs in the candlelight, and felt a quick knock against his foot under the table. He gasped and cleared his throat but Cecil was turning with a bland smile to Mrs Kalbeck, and then as Hubert started to say something idiotic George felt the sole of Cecil’s shoe push against his ankle again quite hard, so that the secret mischief had something rougher in it, as often with Cecil, and after a few testing and self-conscious seconds George regretfully edged his foot out of the way. ‘I’m sure you’re absolutely right,’ said Cecil, with another solemn shake of the head. The fact that he was already mocking his brother made George queasily excited, as if some large shift of loyalties was about to be demanded of him, and he soon got up to deal with the wine for the fish, which the maids were hopelessly dim about.
Mrs Kalbeck tackled a small trout with her customary relish. ‘Do you hunt?’ she asked Cecil, in a square, almost jaunty way, rather as though she were always on a horse herself.
‘I get out with the VWH now and then,’ said Cecil, ‘though I’m afraid my father doesn’t approve.’
‘Oh, really?’
‘He breeds livestock, you see, and has a tender feeling for creatures.’
‘Well, how very sweet,’ said Daphne, shaking her head with dawning approval.
Cecil held her eye with that affable superiority that George could only struggle to emulate. ‘As he doesn’t ride to hounds, he’s gained the reputation locally of being a great scholar.’ She smiled as if mesmerized by this, clearly having no idea what he meant.
George said, ‘Well, Cess, he is something of a scholar.’
‘Indeed he is,’ said Cecil. ‘He’s seen his Cattle Feeds and Cattle Care go into a fourth edition, the most successful literary production of the Valance family by far.’
‘So far, you mean,’ said George.
‘And does your mother share his views on hunting?’ asked Mrs Sawle teasingly, perhaps not sure whom to side with.
‘Oh, Lord, no – no, she’s all for killing. She likes me to get out with a gun when I can, though we keep it from my papa as much as possible. I’m quite a fair shot,’ said Cecil, and with another sly glance round in the candlelight, to see that he had them all: ‘The General sent me out with a gun when I was quite small, to kill a whole lot of rooks that were making a racket – I brought down four of them…’
‘Really…?’ said Daphne, while George waited for the next line -
‘But I wrote a poem about them the following day.’
‘Ah! well…’ – again, they didn’t quite know what to think; while George quickly explained that the General was what they called Cecil’s mother, feeling keenly embarrassed both by the fact and by the pretence that he hadn’t told them this before.
‘I should have explained,’ said Cecil. ‘My mother’s a natural leader of men. But she’s a sweet old thing once you get to know her. Wouldn’t you say, George?’
George thought Lady Valance the most terrifying person he’d ever met, dogmatic, pious, inexcusably direct, and immune to all jokes, even when explained to her; her sons had learned to treasure her earnestness as a great joke in itself. ‘Well, your mother devotes most of her time and energy to good works, doesn’t she,’ George said, with wary piety of his own.
With the serving of the main course and a new wine, George suddenly felt it was going well, what had loomed as an unprecedented challenge was emerging a modest success. Clearly they all admired Cecil, and George’s confidence in his friend’s complete mastery of what to say and do outran his terror of his doing or saying something outrageous, even if simply intended to amuse. At Cambridge Cecil was frequently outrageous, and as for his letters – the things he wrote in letters appeared dimly to George now as a troupe of masked figures, Pompeian obscenities, hiding just out of view behind the curtains, and in the shadows of the inglenook. But for the moment all was well. Rather like the deep in Tennyson’s poem, Cecil had many voices… George’s toe sought out his friend’s now and again, and was received with a playful wriggle rather than a jab. He worried about his mother drinking too much, but the claret was a good one, much commended by Hubert, and a convivial mood, of a perceptibly new kind for ‘Two Acres’, suffused the whole party. Only his sister’s stares and grins at Cecil, and her pert way of putting her head on one side, could really annoy him. Then to his horror he heard Mrs Kalbeck say, ‘And I understand you and George are members of an ancient society!’
‘Oh… oh…’ said George, though at once it was a test above all for Cecil. He found his failure to look at him a reproach in itself.
After a moment, with an almost apologetic flinch, Cecil said, ‘Well, no harm in your knowing, I dare say.’
‘And since candour is our watch-word!’ George put in, glancing with lurking fury at his mother, who had been sworn to secrecy. Cecil must have seen, however, that a light-hearted embrace of the occasion was wiser than a haughty evasion.
‘Oh yes, absolute candour,’ he said.
‘I see…’ said Hubert, who clearly knew nothing about it. ‘And what are you candid about?’
Now Cecil did look at George. ‘Well that,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid we’re not allowed to tell you.’
‘Strict secrecy,’ said George.
‘That’s right,’ said Cecil. ‘In fact that’s our other watchword. You really shouldn’t have been told that we’re members. It’s a most serious breach’ – with the steel of a real displeasure glimpsed through his playful one.
‘Members of what?’ said Daphne, joining the game.
‘Exactly!’ said George, with almost too much relief. ‘There is no society. I trust you haven’t mentioned it to anyone else, Mother.’
She smiled hesitantly. ‘I think only Mrs Kalbeck.’
‘Oh, Mrs Kalbeck doesn’t count,’ said George.
‘Really, George…!’ – his mother almost tumbled her wineglass with the sweep of her sleeve. By luck, there was only a dribble left in it. George grinned at Clara Kalbeck. It was a teasing taste of candour itself, which at Cambridge overrode the principles of kindness and respect, but perhaps wasn’t readily understood here, in the suburbs.
‘No, you know what I mean,’ he said smoothly to his mother, and gave her a quick look, half smile, half frown.
‘The Society is a secret,’ said Cecil, patiently, ‘so that no one can make a fuss about wanting to get into it. But of course I told the General the minute I was elected. And she will have told my father, since she’s a great believer in candour herself. My grandfather was a member too, back in the forties. Many distinguished people were.’
‘We have nothing to do with politics, however,’ said George, ‘or worldly fame. We’re thoroughly democratic.’
‘That’s right,’ said Cecil, with a note of regret. ‘Many great writers have been members, of course.’ He looked down, blinking modestly, and at the same time, sitting forward, gave George a vicious kick under the table. ‘I’m so sorry!’ he said, since George had yelped, and before anyone could quite understand what had happened the talk jumped on to other things, leaving George with a sense of guilty resentment, and beyond it a mysterious vision of screens, as of one train moving behind another, the large collective secret of the Society and the other unspeakable one still surely hidden from view.
By the time the pudding was brought in George was longing for dinner to be over, and wondering how soon he could politely arrange to get Cecil to himself again. He and Cecil ate everything with rapacious speed, while the others were surely dawdling wilfully and whimsically with their food. In the later phases of a meal, he well knew, his mother might go into trances of decoy and delay, a shivering delight in the mere fact of being at table, playful pleadings for a further drop of wine. After that, half an hour over port would be truly intolerable. Hubert’s friendly banalities were as wearing as Daphne’s prying prattle – ‘This will interest you,’ he would say, before launching into a bungled account of something everyone knew already. Perhaps tonight, being so few, they could all get up together; or would Cecil think that very bad form? Was he hideously bored? Or was he, just possibly, completely happy and at ease, and puzzled and even embarrassed by George’s evident desire to get through the meal and away from his family as soon as possible? When his mother pushed back her chair and said, ‘Shall we…?’ with a guarded smile at Mrs Kalbeck, George glanced at Cecil, and found him smiling back – a stranger might have thought amiably, but George knew it as a look of complete determination to get his way. As soon as the three females had passed through into the hall, Cecil nodded nicely to Hubert and said, ‘I have a horrible habit, anathema to polite society, which can only decently be pursued out of doors, under cover of darkness.’
Hubert smiled anxiously at this unexpected confession, whilst producing from his pocket a silver cigarette case which he laid rather bashfully on the table. Cecil in turn drew out the leather sheath that held, like two cartridges in a gun, a brace of cigars. They seemed almost shockingly designed for an exclusive session à deux. ‘But my dear fellow,’ said Hubert, with a note of perplexity, and a shy sweep of the hand to show that he was free to do as he pleased.
‘No, really, I couldn’t possibly fug up in so -’ Cecil was caught for a second – ‘so intimate a setting. Your mother would think very ill of me. It would be all over the house. Even at Corley, you know, we’re fearfully strict about it,’ and he fixed Hubert with a wicked little smile, to suggest this was an exciting moment for him as well, a chance to break with convention whilst still somehow doing the right thing. George wasn’t sure Hubert did see it quite like that, and not waiting for any further accommodations on his part, he said, ‘We’ll have a proper jaw tomorrow night, Huey, when Harry comes.’
‘Well, of course we will,’ said Hubert. He seemed only lightly offended, puzzled but perhaps relieved, acquiescent already to the pact between the Cambridge men. ‘You’ll see we don’t stand on ceremony here, Valance! You go and make as much stink as you like outside, and I’ll… I’ll just shuffle through and have a gasper with the ladies.’ And he flourished his cigarette case at them with an air of cheerful self-sufficiency.
After leaving the dining-room Daphne went upstairs and came back down in her mother’s crimson shawl with black tassels, and with a feeling of doing things that were only just allowed. She saw the housemaid glance at her in what she sensed was a critical way. Coffee and liqueurs had been brought in, and Daphne asked absent-mindedly for a small glass of ginger brandy, which her mother passed to her with a raised eyebrow and the mocking suppression of a smile. Hubert, standing on the hearth-rug, was fiddling with a cigarette case, tapping a cigarette on the lid, and flexing his face as if about to complain, or make a joke, or anyhow say something, which never came. Cecil, apparently not wanting to pollute the house, had seized the moment to open the french windows and take his cigar outside; and George had followed. Mrs Kalbeck sat down in her armchair with a preoccupied smile, and hummed one of her familiar leitmotifs as she looked over the various bottles. Everyone seemed to be quite drunk. To Daphne the lesson of these grown-up dinners was the way they went at the drinks, and what happened when they’d done so. She didn’t mind the general increase in friendliness and noise, and people saying what they thought, even if some of the things George thought were quite strange. What troubled her was when her mother got flushed and talked too much, a development that the others, who were drunk themselves, seemed not to mind. The Welsh came out in her voice in a slightly embarrassing way. If they had music she tended to cry. Now she said, ‘Shall we have some music? I was going to play Cecil my Emmy Destinn.’
‘Well, the window’s open,’ said Daphne, ‘he’ll hear it outside.’ She felt drawn to the garden herself, and had put on the shawl with a vague romantic view to going out.
‘Help me with the machine, child.’
Freda swept across the room, brushing against the small round table with the photographs on it. She was wide-hipped and tightly corseted, and the gathered back of her dress twitched like a memory of a bustle. Daphne watched her for several abstracted seconds in which her mother’s form, known more deeply and unthinkingly than anything in her life, appeared like that of someone quite unknown to her, a determined little woman in front of her in a shop or at the theatre. ‘Well… I have a few letters to write!’ said Hubert. Mrs Kalbeck smiled at him blandly to show she’d still be there when he got back.
The gramophone, in its upright mahogany disguise, was a recent gift of their neighbour Harry Hewitt; apart from the handle sticking out on the right it looked just like a nice old Sheraton cabinet, and part of the fun of playing it to people was to raise the lid and open the drawers and reveal it for what it was. There was no visible horn, and the drawers were really doors, concealing the mysterious louvred compartment from which the music emerged.
Now her mother was stooping and pulling records out from the cupboard at the bottom, trying to find Senta’s Ballad. There were only a dozen records but of course they all looked the same and she didn’t have her spectacles.
‘Are we having the Hollander?’ said Mrs Kalbeck.
‘If Mother can find it,’ said Daphne.
‘Ah, good.’ The old woman sat back with a glass of cherry brandy and a patient smile. She had heard all their records several times, the John McCormack and the Nellie Melba, so the excitement was mixed with a sense of routine, which she seemed to find almost as pleasing.
‘Is this it…?’ said Freda, squinting at the difficult small type on the label.
‘Oh, let me do it,’ said Daphne, dropping down beside her and nudging her until she went away.
It was Daphne’s own favourite, because something she couldn’t describe took place inside her when she heard it, something quite different from the song from Traviata or ‘Linden Lea’. Each time, she looked forward to running again through the keen, almost painful novelty of these particular emotions. She set the disc on the mat, took another big sip from her glass, coughed shamefully, and then cranked up the handle as tight as it would go.
‘Careful, child…!’ said her mother, one hand reaching for the mantelpiece, eyes fixed as if about to sing herself.
‘She’s a strong girl,’ said Mrs Kalbeck.
Daphne lowered the needle and at once walked towards the window, to see if she could spot the boys outside.
The orchestra, they had all agreed, left much to be desired. The strings shrilled like a tin whistle, and the brass thumped like something being thrown downstairs. Daphne knew how to make allowances for this. She had heard a real orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, she had been taken to The Rhinegold at Covent Garden, where they’d had six harps as well as anvils and a giant gong. With a record you learned to ignore the shortcomings if you knew what this piping and thumping stood for.
When Senta started singing it was spellbinding – Daphne said this word to herself with a further shiver of pleasure. She sat on the window-seat with the shawl pulled round her and a mysterious smile on her face at the first intimacies of the ginger brandy. She’d had a real drink before, a half glass of champagne when Huey came of age, and once long ago she and George had done a small but rash experiment with Cook’s brandy. Like the music, a drink was marvellous as well as alarming. She was gripped by the girl’s eerie calls, Jo-ho-he, Jo-ho-he, which had a clear warning of tragedy to them; but at the same time she had a delicious sense of having nothing whatever to worry about. She looked casually at the others, her mother braced as if for the impact of salt waves, Mrs Kalbeck tilting her head in more mature appraisal. Daphne saw the beauty of being spontaneous, and had to hold back a number of things she suddenly felt like saying. She frowned at the Persian rug. There were two sections, which recurred; there was the wild storm music, where you saw the men hanging in the rigging, and then, when the storm was stilled, the most beautiful tune she’d ever heard came in, dropping and soaring, rapturous and free and yet intensely sad, and in either case somehow inevitable. She didn’t know what Senta was saying, beyond the recurrent sounding of the word Mann, but she sensed the presence of passionate love, and felt the air of legend, which had a natural hold on her. Emmy Destinn herself she saw as a wild waif with long dark hair, somehow marked out by her own peculiar name. Almost at once she sang a high note, the brass fell downstairs and Daphne ran over to lift the needle off the disc.
‘It is sadly shortened,’ said Mrs Kalbeck. ‘In truth there are two more strophes.’
‘Yes, dear, you said before,’ said Freda rather sharply; and then, softening as always, ‘There is only so much they can squeeze on to the record. To me it’s a marvel that they do that.’
‘Then shall we have it again?’ said Daphne, looking back at them.
‘Oh, why not!’ said her mother, in a tone of harmless female conspiracy, given more swagger by what Daphne saw as a small crowd of empty glasses. Mrs Kalbeck nodded in helpless agreement. Records were indeed marvels, but they were only tiny helpings from the ocean of music.
During the second helping Daphne moved very slowly across the room, picked up her glass and drained it, and put it down again with a complicated feeling of sadness and satisfaction that was thoroughly endorsed by Wagner’s restless ballad. She slipped out into the garden just as the music hurtled to its end. ‘Oh darling, should you?’ wailed her mother. It was simply that the lure of the other conspiracy, the one she had entered into with the boys in the wood, was so much more urgent than keeping company with the two old women. ‘There may be a dew-fall!’ said Freda, in a tone that suggested an avalanche.
‘I know,’ Daphne called back, seizing her excuse, ‘I’ve left Lord Tennyson out in the dew!’ Things seemed to come to her.
She went quickly past the windows of the house, and then stood still on the edge of the lawn. The grass was dry when she stooped and touched it – it was still too warm for dew. Warm and yet not warm. Seeing the house from outside she remembered her earlier twinge of loneliness, when the sun was setting and the lights came on indoors. She did have to find her books, which would be lying just where she’d left them, by the hammock. She wanted to prepare for the Tennyson reading that Cecil had proposed, she was already imagining it… ‘I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May…’, or, ‘ “The curse is come upon me!” cried the Lady of Shalott’… completely different, of course – she couldn’t decide. But where were the boys? The night seemed to have swallowed them up completely, leaving only the whispering of the breeze in the tree-tops. All she could see was vague silhouettes of black on grey, but the smells of the trees and the grass flooded the air. She felt that Nature was restoring itself in a secret flow of scent while people, most people, stayed heedlessly indoors. There were privet smells and earth smells and rose smells that she took in without naming them in her heady swoop across the lawn. Her heart was beating with the undeniable daring of being out here, and being slightly adrift, coming suddenly on the stone bench and stopping to peer around. Up above, the stars were gathering all the time, sliding out between high faint trails of cloud as though they had grown used to her. She heard a sort of moan, just ahead of her, quickly stifled, and a run of recognizable giggles; and of course that further smell, distinct from dry grass and vegetation, the gentlemanly whiff of Cecil’s cigar.
She went a few steps towards the clump of trees where the hammock was slung. She didn’t know if she’d been seen. It was oddly like the minute of uncertainty before, in the wood, when Cecil had just arrived, and she couldn’t tell if she was spying. Now, though, it was far too dark for spying. She heard Cecil say something funny about a moustache, ‘quite an adorable moustache’; George murmured something and Cecil said, ‘I suppose he wears it to make himself look older, but of course it has just the opposite effect, he looks like a boy playing hide and seek.’ ‘Hmm… I’m not sure anyone’s seeking especially,’ said George. ‘Well…’ said Cecil, and there was a little stifled rumpus of giggles and grunts that went on for ten seconds, till George said, rather loudly, gasping for breath, ‘No, no, besides, Hubert’s a womanizer through and through.’
A womanizer…! The word lay, sinuous and poisonous, in the shadowy borders of Daphne’s vocabulary. For a moment she pictured it, and behind it a vaguer image still, of a man dancing with a woman in a low-cut dress. The drunkenness of her own evening was lurchingly intensified in this imaginary room, where it was really the woman she saw, and certainly not Hubert, who was quite the most awkward figure when it came to dancing. A strange silence fell, in which she heard her own pulse in her ear. Part of her, she realized, needed to learn more. Then, ‘What is it, Daphne?’ said George.
‘Oh, are you here?’ she said, and she pushed on, under the low branches that screened the hammock on that side. ‘I’ve left my books out here, in the dew.’
‘Well, I haven’t seen them,’ said George, and she heard the hammock rope shift and creak against the tree.
‘No, you wouldn’t have seen them, of course, because it’s the night.’ She laughed mockingly and slid her foot forward over the invisible ground. ‘But I know where they are. I can picture them.’
‘All right,’ said George.
She edged forward again, and could just make out the slump of the hammock as it tilted and steadied. Again, she stooped to pat the grass, and half fell forward, startled and amused by her own tipsiness. ‘Isn’t Cecil with you?’ she said artfully.
‘Ha…!’ said Cecil softly, just above her, and pulled on his cigar – she looked up and saw the scarlet burn of its tip and beyond it, for three seconds, the shadowed gleam of his face. Then the tip twitched away and faded and the darkness teemed in to where his features had been, while the sharp dry odour floated wide.
‘Are you both in the hammock!’ She stood up straight, with a sense that she’d been tricked, or anyway overlooked, in this new game they were making up. She reached out a hand for the webbing, where it fanned towards their feet. It would be very easy, and entertaining, to rock them, or even tip them out; though she felt at the same time a simple urge to climb in with them. She had shared the hammock with her mother, when she was smaller, and being read to; now she was mindful of the hot cigar. ‘Well, I must say,’ she said. The cigar tip, barely showing, dithered in the air like some dimly luminous bug and then glowed into life again, but now it was George’s face that she saw in its faint devilish light. ‘Oh, I thought it was Cecil’s cigar,’ she said simply.
George chortled in three quick huffs of smoke. And Cecil cleared his throat – somehow supportively and appreciatively. ‘So it was,’ said George, in his most paradoxical tone. ‘I’m smoking Cecil’s cigar too.’
‘Oh really…’ said Daphne, not knowing what tone to give the words. ‘Well, I shouldn’t let Mother find out.’
‘Oh, most young men smoke,’ said George.
‘Oh, do they?’ she said, deciding sarcasm was her best option. She watched, pained and tantalized, as the next glow showed up a hint of Cecil’s cheeks and watchful eyes through a fading puff of smoke. Quite without warning The Flying Dutchman began again, startlingly loud through the open windows.
‘God! What’s that, the third time…!’ said George.
‘Lord,’ said Cecil. ‘They are keen.’
‘It’s Kalbeck, of course,’ George said, as though to exonerate the Sawles themselves from such obsessive behaviour. ‘God knows what the Cosgroves must think.’
‘Mother loved Wagner long before she met Mrs Kalbeck,’ said Daphne.
‘We all love Wagner, darling. But he’s quite repetitious enough on his own account without playing the same record ten times.’
‘It’s Senta’s Ballad,’ Daphne said, not immune to it herself this third time, in fact suddenly more moved by it out in the open, as if it were in the air itself, a part of nature, and wanting them all to listen and share in it. The orchestra sounded better from here, like a real band heard at a distance, and Emmy Destinn seemed even more wild and intense. For a moment she pictured the lit house behind them as a ship in the night. ‘Cecil,’ she said fondly, using his name for the first time, ‘I expect you understand the words.’
‘Ja, ja, clear as mud,’ said Cecil, with a friendly though disconcerting snort.
‘She’s a mad girl in love with a man she’s never seen,’ said George, ‘and the man is under a curse and can only be redeemed by a woman’s love. And she rather fancies being that woman. There you are.’
‘One feels no good will come of it,’ said Cecil.
‘Oh, but listen…’ said Daphne.
‘Would you like a go?’ said Cecil.
Daphne, taking in what she’d just been told about Senta, leant on the rope. ‘In the hammock…?’
‘On the cigar.’
‘Really…’ murmured George, a little shocked.
‘Oh, I don’t think so!’
Cecil took an exemplary pull on it. ‘I know girls aren’t meant to have them.’
Now the lovely tune was pulsing through the garden, full of yearning and defiance and the heightened effect of beauty encountered in an unexpected setting. She really didn’t want the cigar, but she was worried by the thought of missing a chance at it. It was something none of her friends had done, she was pretty sure of that.
‘No, it is a fine song,’ said Cecil, and she heard how his words were a little slurred and careless. Now the cigar was being passed to George again.
‘Oh, all right,’ she said.
‘Yes?’
‘I mean, yes, please.’
She leant on George and felt the whole hammock shudder, and held his arm firmly to take the item, taboo and already slightly disgusting, from between his thumb and forefinger. By now she could half-see the two boys squashed together, rather absurd, drunk of course, but also solid and established, like a long-ago memory of her parents sitting up in bed. She had the smell of the thing near her face, almost coughed before she tasted it, and then pinched her lips quickly round it, with a feeling of shame and duty and regret.
‘Oh!’ she said, thrusting it away from her and coughing harshly at the tiny inrush of smoke. The bitter smoke was horrible, but so was the unexpected feel of the thing, dry to the fingers but wet and decomposing on the lips and tongue. George took it from her with a vaguely remorseful laugh. When she’d coughed again she turned and did a more unladylike thing and spat on the grass. She wanted the whole thing out of her system. She was glad of the dark, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Beyond her, in the friendly familiar house, Emmy Destinn was still singing, in noble ignorance of Daphne’s behaviour.
‘Want another puff?’ said Cecil, as though satisfied with her reaction to the first.
‘I think not!’ said Daphne.
‘You’ll like the second one much more.’
‘That seems unlikely.’
‘And the third one will be better still.’
‘And before you know where you are,’ said George, ‘you’ll be strolling through Stanmore with a pongy old cheroot clamped between your teeth.’
‘Don’t I detect Miss Sawle’s cigar?’ said Cecil facetiously.
‘That would never happen,’ said Daphne.
But she was really very happy after all, standing there, peering somewhat speculatively into the smoky darkness. ‘Is ginger brandy considered a strong drink?’ she was saying. It must be the drink that gave this lovely spontaneity to things, so that she spoke or moved without deciding to do so.
‘Oh dear, Daph,’ said George. And before she knew what she’d done, she was heaving herself, gasping and laughing, onto the near end of the hammock, where the boys’ feet were.
‘Mind out!’ said George. ‘That’s my foot…’
‘You’ll break the blasted thing,’ said Cecil.
‘For God’s sake…!’ said George, tilting sideways in the effort to leap out, and in a second she was jolted on to the ground, Cecil was tumbling, his foot caught her, rather hard, between the ribs.
‘Ow!’ she said, and then ‘ow…’ but she despised the shock and fright; she was laughing again as the boys reached awkwardly for each other, and then she let herself be pulled up. She knew she had heard her shawl tearing as she fell, and that this was one part of the escapade she would not get away with; but again she didn’t terribly care.
‘Perhaps we should go in,’ said Cecil, ‘before something truly scandalous happens.’
They shepherded each other out on to the lawn, with little pats and murmurs. George spent a moment tucking his shirt in and getting his trousers straight. ‘At Corley, of course, you have a smoking-room,’ he said. ‘This sort of thing could never happen.’
‘Indeed,’ said Cecil solemnly. Emmy Destinn had finished, and in her place Daphne saw the figure of her mother coming to the lighted window and peering vainly out.
‘We’re all here!’ Daphne shouted. And in the darkness, under the millions of stars, with the boys on either side of her, she felt she could speak for them all; there was a hilarious safety that seemed a renewal of the pact they had made without speaking when Cecil arrived.
‘Well, hurry in,’ her mother said, in a hectic, ingenious tone. ‘I want Cecil to read to us.’
‘There you are,’ murmured Cecil, straightening his bow-tie. Daphne glanced up at him. George went responsibly ahead on the path, and as they followed behind him Cecil slipped his large hot hand around her, and left it there, just where he’d kicked her, until they reached the open french windows.
After breakfast next morning she found Cecil in a deckchair on the lawn, writing in a small brown book. She sat down too, on a nearby wall, keen to observe a poet at work, and just close enough to put him off; in a minute he turned and smiled and shut his book with the pencil in it. ‘What have you got there?’ he said.
She was holding a small book of her own, an autograph album bound in mauve silk. ‘I don’t know if you can be prevailed upon,’ she said.
‘May I see?’
‘If you like you can just put your name. Though obviously…’
Cecil’s long arm and blue-veined hand seemed to pull her to him. She presented the book with a blush and mixed feelings of pride and inadequacy. She said, ‘I’ve only been keeping it a year.’
‘So whom have you got?’
‘I’ve got Arthur Nikisch. I suppose he’s the best.’
‘Right-oh!’ said Cecil, with the delighted firmness that conceals a measure of uncertainty. She leant over the back of the deckchair to guide him to the page. He was like an uncle this morning, confidential without the least hint of intimacy. Last night’s rough-house, apparently, had never happened. She noticed again that smell he had, as if he’d always just got back from one of his rambles, or scrambles, which she pictured as fairly boisterous affairs. Oh, it was so typical of boys, they got on their dignity, they kept closing the door on some interesting scene they had let you witness a moment before. Though perhaps it was meant as a reproach to her, for last night’s foolery.
‘I got him when we went to The Rhinegold.’
‘Ah yes… He’s quite a big shot, isn’t he?’
‘Herr Nikisch? Well, he’s the conductor!’
‘No, I’ve heard of him,’ said Cecil. ‘You may as well know that I have a tin ear, by the way.’
‘Oh…’ said Daphne, and looked for a moment at Cecil’s left ear, which was brown and sunburnt on top. She said, ‘I should have thought a poet had a good ear,’ with a frown at the unexpected cleverness of her own words.
‘I can hear poems,’ said Cecil. ‘But all the Valances are tone-deaf, I’m afraid. The General’s almost queer about it. She went to The Gondoliers once, but she said never again. She thought it was never going to end.’
‘Well, she certainly wouldn’t like Wagner, in that case,’ said Daphne, rescuing a kindly superiority from her initial sense of disappointment. And still not quite sure she had got to the bottom of it, ‘Though you said you liked the gramophone last night.’
‘Oh, I don’t hate it, it’s just rather lost on me. I was enjoying the company.’ His ear coloured slightly at this, and she saw that perhaps she’d been given a compliment, and blushed a little herself. He said, ‘Did you care for the opera when you went?’
‘They had a new swimming apparatus for the Rhine-maidens, but I didn’t find it very convincing.’
‘It must be hard work swimming and singing at the same time,’ said Cecil, turning the page. ‘Now who’s this Byzantine fellow?’
‘That’s Mr Barstow.’
‘Should I know him?’
‘He’s the curate in Stanmore,’ said Daphne, unsure if they were both admiring the elaborate penwork.
‘I see… And now: Olive Watkins, you could read that at twenty paces.’
‘I didn’t really want to have her, as it’s supposed to be only adults, but she got me for hers.’ Underneath her signature Olive had written, with great force, ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed’, the indentations of the pen being readable on the following pages. ‘She has the best collection, certainly that I know,’ said Daphne. ‘She has Winston Churchill.’
‘My word…’ said Cecil respectfully.
‘I know.’
Cecil turned a page or two. ‘But you’ve got Jebland, look. That’s special in another way.’
‘He’s my other best,’ Daphne admitted. ‘He only sent it me the week before his propeller broke. I’ve learned that you can’t wait with airmen. They’re not like other autographs. That’s how Olive lost Stefanelli.’
‘And does Olive have Jebland?’
‘No, she does not,’ said Daphne, trying to subdue the note of triumph to one of respect for the dead aviator.
‘I see it’s rather morbid,’ said Cecil. ‘You make me feel a little anxious.’
‘Oh, everyone else in it is still alive!’
Cecil closed the book. ‘Well, leave it with me, and I promise I’ll think something up before I go.’
‘Do feel free to write some occasional verse.’ She came round the chair and stood looking at him full-face. He was fingering his own book again as he squinted up at her, smiling tensely against the light. She felt the momentary advantage she had over him, and gazed with a novel kind of licence at his parted lips and his strong brown neck where it emerged from his soft blue shirt. He was surely writing a poem now, the pencil was waiting in the cruck of the notebook. She felt she couldn’t ask about it. But nor could she let him alone. She said, ‘Have you seen over the garden?’
‘D’you know, I have. I rambled right round it with Georgie, first thing.’
‘Oh…’
‘Oh, long before you were up. I went and tipped him out of bed.’
‘I see…’
‘I’m a pagan, you see, and I worship the dawn. I’m trying to instil the cult in your brother.’
‘I wonder how you’ll get on.’ Cecil closed his eyes languidly as he smiled, so that she had a further sense of screened-off mysteries. ‘Perhaps tomorrow you could tip me out of bed too.’
‘Do you think your mother would approve?’
‘Oh, she won’t mind.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
‘I could show you all kinds of things.’ She felt the grass with her hand before sitting down beside Cecil’s chair. ‘I can’t believe George showed you the whole of “Two Acres”.’
‘Well, possibly not…’ said Cecil, with a quick snigger.
Daphne peered encouragingly at the view – the neat parched lawn, the little tor of the rockery, the line of dark firs that hid the Cosgroves’ potting-shed and motor-garage. To her the ‘Two’ in her house’s name had always been reassuring, a quietly emphatic boast to schoolfriends who lived in a town or a terrace, the proof of a generous over-provision. But in Cecil’s presence she felt the first shimmer of uncertainty. Sitting side by side, she hoped to make him share her view, but wondered if she hadn’t started sharing his instead. She said, ‘You know, the rockery was my father’s contribution.’
‘He must have put a good deal of work into it,’ said Cecil.
‘Yes, he worked terribly hard at it. Those large red stones came all the way from Devon – which of course he did!’
‘They will be a strange geological conundrum to later ages,’ said Cecil.
‘Yes, I suppose they will.’
‘They will be like the monoliths of Stonehenge.’
‘Mm,’ said Daphne, sensing teasing where she’d hoped for something better. She pressed on, ‘My father wasn’t artistic like my mother, but she gave him a free hand with the rockery. In a way it’s his monument.’
Cecil stared at it with a chastened expression. ‘I suppose you don’t really remember your father,’ he said. ‘You must have been too young.’
‘Oh, I remember him quite well.’ She nodded up at him. ‘He used to come home from work, and have his Old Smuggler while I was in the bath.’
‘You mean he drank whisky in the bathroom?’
‘Yes, while he was telling me a story. We had a nanny of course, who used to bath me. Frankly, I think we had rather more money then, than we have now.’
Cecil gave her the fleeting wince of merely abstract sympathy that she’d noticed already when it came to money or servants. ‘I can’t imagine my father doing that,’ he said.
‘Well, your father doesn’t go to work, does he.’
‘That’s true,’ said Cecil, and giggled attractively.
‘Of course Huey works very hard. My mother says one of us needs to get married.’
‘Well, I’ve no doubt you will,’ said Cecil, his dark eyes holding hers and his eyebrow rising slightly for emphasis and a hint of amusement, so that her heart thumped and she hurried on,
‘One day, we’ll see. I dare say we all will.’ She wanted to say she had overheard them last night, and to tell him they were wrong, he and George: Hubert wasn’t a womanizer at all, he was really intensely respectable. But she was frightened by this unknown subject, and worried that she might have misunderstood.
‘I don’t think George has a particular girlfriend?’ said Cecil, after a minute.
‘We all thought you would know,’ she said, and then regretted the suggestion that they’d been talking about him. Something in Cecil of course demanded to be talked about. She tore up a few blades of grass, and glanced at him, feeling still the great novelty and interest of his presence. He shifted in the deckchair, crossed his right ankle on his left knee, a glimpse of brown calf. He was wearing white canvas shoes, scuffed at the heel. It would be amusing if they could explain George to each other behind his back. She said, ‘We all thought there might be someone when he started getting letters; but of course they were from you!’
Cecil looked both pleased and embarrassed by this, and glanced over his shoulder at the house. ‘But what about your mother, do you think?’ he said, in a sudden sensitive tone. ‘She’s still quite young, and really most attractive. She might marry again herself. She must have many admirers…?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so!’ Daphne frowned and blushed at the question. It was one thing to talk about poor George’s prospects, quite another to ask about those of a middle-aged lady whom he hardly knew. It was most inappropriate; and besides, the last thing she wanted was a stepfather. She pictured Harry Hewitt standing on her father’s rockery – worse, ordering its demolition. Though actually, almost certainly, they would all have to move to Mattocks, with its peculiar pictures and statues. She sat looking at Cecil’s white shoes, and thinking rather hard. He didn’t press her for an answer. She saw it was a new kind of talk, that she wasn’t quite ready for, like certain books, which were in English obviously, but too grown-up for her to understand. He said,
‘I didn’t mean to pry. You know how Georgie and I and all our lot are devils for speaking candidly.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said.
‘Tell me it’s none of my business.’
‘Well, there’s a man who’s coming to dinner tonight that I think likes my mother a lot,’ she said, and a sense of betrayal discoloured the following seconds.
‘Is this Harry?’
‘Yes, it is,’ she said, feeling her shame still more.
‘The man who gave you the gramophone.’
‘Oh, yes, well he’s given us all kinds of things. He’s given Hubert a gun, and… lots of things. The Complete Works of Sheridan.’
‘I imagine Huey might appreciate some of these gifts rather more than others,’ said Cecil, again familiar and casual.
‘Well… He gave me a dressing set, with a scent bottle, which I’m not old enough for, and silver-backed brushes.’
‘He sounds like Father Christmas,’ said Cecil; and with a hint of boredom, looking round, ‘What a jolly fellow.’
‘Hmm. He’s very generous, I suppose, but he’s not a bit jolly. You’ll see.’ She glanced up at him, still strangely indignant both with him and with Harry, but he was gazing at the top of the spinney, where they’d met last night, as if at something much more intriguing. ‘He goes to Germany a great deal, he does import-export, you know. He brings us back things.’
‘And you think all these presents are his way of… paying court to your mamma,’ said Cecil.
‘I fear so.’
Cecil’s splendid profile, the autocratic nose and slightly bulbous eye, seemed poised for judgement; but when he turned and smiled she felt the sudden return of his attention and kindness. ‘But, my dear child, you’ve no need to fear unless you think she returns his feelings.’
‘Oh, I don’t know…!’ She was flustered, by having come so far, and by this unexpected word child, which was what her mother herself called her, quite naturally, though often with a hint of criticism. She had got it last night, once or twice, when she was trying to make Cecil feel at home and asking him questions. He must have heard her say it. Now she felt some not quite nice rhetorical advantage had been taken of her – he’d humbled her at the very moment he was meant to be cheering her up.
Cecil smiled. ‘I tell you what. I’ll have a good look at him, as a total outsider, and let you know what I think.’
‘All right…’ said Daphne, not at all sure about this compromise.
‘Ah!’ said Cecil, sitting forward in his chair. George was coming across the lawn, his jacket hooked over his shoulder, and whistling cheerily. Then he stood looking down at them, with a question hidden somewhere in his smile.
‘What is that thing you’re always whistling?’ said Daphne.
‘I don’t know,’ said George. ‘It’s a song my gyp sings, “When I sees you, my heart goes boomps-a-daisy”.’
‘Really…! I’d have thought if you had to whistle, you’d have chosen something nice,’ and seeing a chance to bring them all back to the subject of last night – ‘such as The Flying Dutchman, for instance.’
George pressed his hand to his heart and started on the lovely part of Senta’s Ballad, staring at her with his eyebrows raised and slowly shaking his head, as if to throw his own self-consciousness over to her. He had a sweet high swooping whistle, but he put in so much vibrato he made the song sound rather silly, and soon he couldn’t keep his lips together and the whistle became a breathy laugh.
‘Hah…’ muttered Cecil, seeming slightly uncomfortable, standing up and slipping his notebook into his jacket pocket. Then, with a cold smile, ‘No… I can’t whistle, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, with your tin ear!’ said Daphne.
‘I’m just going to take this precious book inside,’ he said, holding up Daphne’s little album. And they watched him cross the lawn and go in by the garden door.
‘So what were you talking about to Cess?’ said George, looking down at her again with his funny smile.
She picked over the grass in front of her, in a teasing delay. Her first thought, surprisingly strong, was that her own relations with Cecil, going on quite independently of George’s, if not entirely satisfactorily, must be kept as secret as possible. She felt there was something there, which mustn’t be exposed to reason or mockery. ‘We were talking about you, of course,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ said George, ‘that must have been interesting.’
Daphne gave a soft snort at this. ‘If you must know, Cecil was asking if you had any particular girlfriends.’
‘Oh,’ said George, more airily this time, ‘and what did you say?’ – he had started blushing, and turned away in a vain attempt to conceal the fact. Now he was gazing off down the garden, as if he’d just noticed something interesting. It was quite unexpected, and it even took Daphne, with her sisterly intuition, a few moments to understand, and then shout out,
‘Oh, George, you have!’
‘What…? Oh nonsense…’ George said. ‘Be quiet!’
‘You have, you have!’ said Daphne, feeling at once how the joy of discovery was shadowed by the sense of being left behind.
Once the gentlemen had gone out, Jonah set off upstairs, and was almost at the top when he found he’d forgotten Mr Cecil’s shoes, and turned back to get them. But just then he heard voices in the hall below. They must have gone into the study for a minute, to the right of the front door: now they were by the hall-stand, getting their hats. Jonah stood where he was, not hiding, but in the shadows, on the turn of the stair.
‘Is this one yours?’ Cecil said.
‘Oh, you ass,’ said George. ‘Come on, let’s get out. I’ll bring this, I think, just in case.’
‘Good idea… How do I look?’
‘You look quite decent, for once. Jonah must be doing all right for you.’
‘Oh, Jonah’s a dream,’ said Cecil. ‘Did I tell you, I’m taking him back to Corley with me.’
‘Oh no, you don’t!’ There was a little tussle that Jonah couldn’t see, giggling and gasping, voices under their breath, ‘… ow!… for God’s sake, Cecil…’ and then the noise of the front door opening. Jonah went up three steps and peeped out of the little window. Cecil vaulted the garden gate, and George seemed to think about it, just for a moment, and then opened it and went out. Cecil was already some way down the lane.
Jonah waited a minute longer where he was, looking up the last three stairs and across the landing towards the spare-room door. Jonah’s a dream – what a way they talked… though it must mean things were going all right, he was doing it all convincingly. He didn’t think Mrs Sawle would let Cecil take him away, and he certainly didn’t want to leave home. He’d been into Harrow, of course, many times, and Edgware, and once to the Alexandra Palace to hear the organ… He went on up. The landing was dark, with its oak panelling and thick Turkey carpet, but the bedrooms were flung open so as to air and were full of light. He could hear Veronica, the housemaid, in Mr Hubert’s room, her grunts as she shook and thumped the pillows; she talked to herself, in a pleasant, businesslike mutter, ‘… there you are… up we go… thank you very much…’. Jonah felt he had understood something, they had decided he was ready. He looked forward to straightening the room and taking his time with Cecil’s things, examining the buttons and pockets in more detail. He would never have said it to anyone downstairs, but he thought if he learned valeting it could be a job for him, in a year or two’s time. One day, perhaps, he would let Mr Cecil, or someone very like him, take him away after all.
Then he pushed open the door, and saw at once he knew nothing, they’d told him nothing about what went on between bedtime and breakfast. It was like stepping into another house. Or else, he felt, as he took two or three short steps into the room, or else this Mr Cecil Valance was a lunatic; and at this thought he gave a sort of staring giggle. Well, he would have to wait for Veronica. The bed was all over the floor as if a fight had taken place in it. He looked at the shaving-water cold and scummy in the basin, the shaving-brush lying in a wet ring on top of the bookcase. He frowned at the clothes strewn over the floor and across the little armchair with a new and painful feeling that he’d known them in an earlier and happier time, when things were still going convincingly. And the roses were as good as dead – yes, Cecil must have knocked them over and then jammed the stems just anyhow into the vase with no water. Their heads had dropped after a few hours of neglect, and a patch on the patterned rug was dark and damp to the back of the hand. On the dressing-table the scribbled sheets of paper were more what Jonah had expected. ‘When you were there, and I away,’ Jonah read, ‘But scenting in the Alpine air the roses of an English May.’ Then he snatched up the shaving-brush and stared at the oily pool it had made.
Jonah went over to the waste-paper basket, as if routinely tidying a barely occupied room, and took out the handful of bits of paper. He saw one of them was written by George, and felt embarrassed on his behalf that his guest should have made such a mess. It was hard to read… ‘Veins’, it seemed to say, if that was how you spelt it: ‘Viens.’ The poetry notebook, that Jonah had been told never to touch, still lay within reach, on the bedside table. Later, he thought, he almost certainly would have a look at it.
‘I see he’s made himself at home,’ said Veronica from the door, and her competent tone cheered Jonah up. ‘Yes, Cook said he’ll make a mess but he’ll give you ten shillings – could be a guinea if you’re lucky.’
‘I expect so,’ said Jonah, as though used to such treatment, stuffing the bits of paper awkwardly into his trouser pocket. Then he couldn’t help smiling. ‘Cook said that?’
Veronica plucked the pillows off the bed. ‘Well, he’s an aristocrat,’ she said, with the air of someone who’d seen a few. ‘If they make a mess they can pay for it.’ She pulled the rucked bottom sheet tight and looked at it with a raised eyebrow and a strange twist of the mouth. ‘Well, Jonah, look what I see.’
‘Oh yes…’ said Jonah.
‘Your gentleman’s had a mission.’
‘Oh,’ said Jonah, with the same look of suppressed confusion.
Veronica glanced at him shrewdly but not unkindly. ‘You don’t know what that is, do you? A nocturnal mission, they call it. It’s something the young gentlemen are very much prone to.’ She tugged off the sheet with surprising strength, the mattress shuddering as it came free. ‘There you are, smell it, you can always tell.’
‘No, I won’t!’ said Jonah, feeling this wasn’t right, and colouring up at the sudden connection it made with a worry of his own.
‘Well, you’ll know all about it soon enough, my dear,’ said Veronica, who had just taken on in Jonah’s mind the character of someone alarmingly older and rather wicked. ‘Ah! Don’t you worry. You should see Mr Hubert’s. Have to change his sheets two or three times a week. Mrs S. knows – I mean, she didn’t say anything exactly, she just said, “Any marks or stains, Veronica, kindly change the boys’ sheets.” It’s a fact of nature, my dear, I’m afraid.’
Jonah busied himself picking up and folding clothes, unsure if the items that had been worn should be put back in the wardrobe or politely hidden somewhere else until Cecil left and they could be packed again; he couldn’t ask Veronica anything while her upsetting little speech was still burning his ears. Here was the cast-off dress-shirt from last night, a grey smear across its stiff white front, cigar ash perhaps, and the beautiful singlet and drawers, fine as ladies’ wear, now thoughtlessly stained in ways he wouldn’t be able to look into until later, when he was by himself. He took the wash-basin out of the room and across the landing and emptied it carefully into the lavatory. A thousand tiny bristles in a scum of soap still clung to the curved surface, and he stared at them, as he did at everything of Cecil’s, with an awful mixture of worry and pride.
Later he went out to the privy, and in the grey light through the frosted-glass square in the door he took out the rubbish from his pocket and sat turning it over, turning it round and reading the crossed-out words on it. He had a clear sense of giving way to ‘idle curiosity’, which was something Cook was very censorious about. The ripe collective stink beneath him, thinly smothered with coke ash from the kitchen, made his actions feel more furtive and wicked. He wasn’t quite sure even why he was doing it. The gentlemen’s talk was different from normal talk, and George was different too, now his friend was here… ‘A hammock in the shade’, Jonah made out. ‘A larch tree at your head and at your feet a pussy willow.’ He was slow to make the connection with anything he knew, and it was only when he’d read a bit more that the uneasy recognition dawned on him. Mr Cecil was writing about their own hammock, which Jonah himself had helped Mr Hubert to sling up at the start of the summer. He wondered what he was going to say about it. ‘A birch tree at your feet, And overhead a weeping willow’ – he couldn’t make up his mind! Then written up the edge of the page, ‘As wood-lice chew willows, So do mites bite pillows!’ – this was crossed out, with a wavy line. The muddled worry that he was saying something shocking, that there might be mites in the bedding here, in Mrs Sawle’s best goose pillows, took a moment to rise and fade. He remembered it was poetry, but wasn’t sure if that made it more or less likely to be true. Another piece of paper had been torn in half, and he held the two edges together, wondering if Wilkes ever did anything like this, when he emptied his master’s waste-paper basket.
Within that thronging singing woodland round
Two blessed acres of English ground,
And leading roaming by its outmost edge
Beneath a darkling cypress myrtle privet hedge
With hazel-clusters hung above
We’ll walk the secret long dark wild dark path of love
Whose secrets none shall ever hear
Twixt set of sun late last rook and Chaunticleer.
Love as vital as the spring
And secret as – XXX (some
Hearty, lusty, true and bold,
Yet shy to have its honour told -
here there was a very dense crossing out, as if not only Cecil’s words but his very ideas had had to be obliterated. Jonah heard the well-known scrape of the scullery door and footsteps on the brick path – and in a moment the bulk of a large person outside (Cook, was it, or Miss Mustow?) cut off his light, and now his hand shook as the latch was rattled and he fumbled the papers back into his pocket. ‘Just a minute!’ he called out, wondering for a second if he should throw the bits of paper down into the privy, but then thinking better of it.
Freda lifted her glass and surveyed the table with the open-minded smile of someone who has not been paying attention. But yes, indeed, it was Germany again, and now Harry said how ‘each day brings us one day nearer to the German war’ – a catch-phrase of his that was beginning to irritate her. ‘I’m in and out of Hamburg a good deal on business,’ he explained, ‘and I know what I’ve seen.’ Freda didn’t care at all for the idea of a German war, and felt impatient with Harry for predicting it so insistently; but Cecil seemed ready to fight at once – he said he would jump at the chance. It was touching, and slightly comical, to see George’s indecision. Anyone less inclined to fight it would be hard to imagine, but he was clearly reluctant to disappoint Cecil. ‘I suppose I would, would I? – if it came to it,’ he said.
‘Oh, no question, old chap,’ said Cecil, and managed, with a slow turn of the head, to give them all a look at his profile. He’d told them already how much he liked killing, and clearly Germans would represent an exciting advance on mere foxes, pheasants and ducks. Freda was glad Clara wasn’t here tonight: her brother, who seemed to be her only relative, was in the Kaiser’s army, though a clerical job of some kind, thank heavens. She said,
‘I’m not quite certain I want my boys getting hacked to pieces’ – in a droll tone, but the image startled them all, the boys themselves gleaming in the candlelight, Huey wiping his moustache with a white napkin. Huey said sternly but kindly,
‘Let us hope it doesn’t come to that, Mother.’
‘I think our boys are ready for a scrap,’ said Elspeth.
‘Yes, but you don’t have any boys to get in a scrap, my dear,’ said Freda. Elspeth was Harry’s spinster sister, and one had to wonder, if Harry were to marry, where Elspeth would go. She’d kept house for him for so many years that it was hard to imagine her in a house of her own. But she would have to go somewhere… But then, Harry marry, wasn’t there something absurd in the very phrase?
The pudding was a macédoine of fruits, the apples from the orchard. Cecil, on Freda’s right, ate quickly and without apparent pleasure, even with a vague air of annoyance. Disheartening for a hostess, but was it perhaps a sign of good breeding not to dwell on food? Something put in front of you by servants, something that stopped you talking, however briefly, about matters that were more important. George tonight was beside Cecil, and somehow teamed with him; now and then he put a hand on his sleeve and murmured to him under the louder talk all around, but Cecil’s preference was to speak to the whole table. Cecil too had been to Germany, and produced rather crushingly a good deal of information on the military and industrial side – much of it seemingly untranslatable. Freda, whose German was limited to heroic expressions of love, loyalty and revenge, and how to ask for a brandy and water, soon felt sad and somewhat squashed. Her Germany was hot, formal though not well organized, a maze of arrangements all shot through and redeemed for ever by the love of the Volsungs, the Forest Murmurs, and Wotan’s Farewell, the keenest ten minutes in the ten years of her widowhood. A shudder ran up her spine and her lower lip drew back at the thought of it.
An awkward seating, with Daphne facing the two boys, and flanked by Harry and Elspeth. Daphne looked crushed herself, but revived in a moment whenever Cecil turned his attention to her. Normally Harry brought a glow, almost at times a sparkle, to Hubert – he was the one among her friends who paid him the most attention; but this evening Huey seemed somewhat preoccupied – was he even a little jealous of Cecil’s evident fascination for Harry? Harry, who seemed to see all the new books, had a number of questions for him about Cambridge figures. ‘I wonder if you know young Rupert Brooke?’ he asked.
‘Oh, Rupert Brooke,’ said Freda, ‘what an Adonis!’
Cecil gave a snuffly smile as if at some rather basic misapprehension. ‘Oh, yes, I know Brooke,’ he said. ‘We used to see a lot of him in College, but now of course rather less.’
‘My mother thinks Rupert’s work rather advanced,’ said George.
‘Really, my dear?’ said Elspeth, with twinkling concern.
Freda thought it best not to protest – as a mother one had to play the fool from time to time. ‘I didn’t awfully care to read about his being sea-sick,’ she said, ‘to be perfectly honest.’
‘Oh, gobbets up I throw!’ said Daphne.
‘Thank you, child, I said I didn’t care for it.’ In fact it was one of their own silly catch-phrases, those puerile tags that reduced the family to weeping laughter but were strictly not for the outside world. Freda gave her daughter a sharp pinch of a frown, in part to stop herself smirking. She felt Cecil would be forming a very poor impression of all of them.
‘I’m no expert on poetry,’ said Hubert, with sweet redundancy, and seemed ready to head them off in another direction.
‘I’m less up to date with English poetry,’ said Elspeth.
Harry said, ‘I always enjoy Strachey’s pieces in the Spectator – you must know him, I suppose?’
Again, perhaps, was the boys’ Club in the air, that fearfully important ‘Conversazione Society’ she wasn’t allowed to mention? ‘We do see Lytton from time to time,’ Cecil said, with an air of discretion.
‘Now he’s awfully clever,’ said Elspeth.
‘Who’s that, dear?’ said Freda.
‘Lytton Strachey – you must have seen his Landmarks in French Literature.’
‘Oh… I…?’
‘Harry thought less highly of it than I did.’
‘I prefer a heavier ratio of fact to hot air,’ said Harry.
‘We all believe Lytton will do something brilliant one day,’ said Cecil suavely.
‘I don’t care for him,’ said George.
‘Now, why’s that, dear?’ said Freda mockingly, though she didn’t think she’d ever heard of this man Strachey before a minute ago.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ muttered George, and blushed, and then looked rather cross.
‘No one could deny,’ said Cecil, ‘that poor Strachey has the most unfortunate speaking voice.’
‘Oh…?’ Freda knew she mustn’t catch Daphne’s eye.
‘What you musical types I believe call a falsetto. It makes any sort of public speaking impossible for him.’
‘Even his private speaking’s pretty impossible,’ said George.
‘Well, happily, we don’t have to hear the fellow,’ said Harry; ‘or, in your mother’s case, read him either.’ He looked at Freda beside him with a smirk of almost parental collusion, and then at Hubert, who laughed uncertainly. It would be something one had to put up with, his cool good humour curdling into sarcasm. He was a kind and generous man, oddly generous perhaps for one so cool, but you couldn’t be sure he would make the right effect.
‘Well, on the matter of at least semi-public speaking…’ said Cecil archly, and gave a strange look at Daphne.
‘Oh yes!’ said Daphne, with a child’s alertness at the sudden touch of attention. ‘What about our readings, Cecil?’
‘Oh, my dear, what’s this?’ said Freda, fearing Daphne was about to bore their guests.
‘It was Cecil’s idea,’ said Daphne.
‘He may have said it just to be kind,’ said Freda.
‘Not a bit of it,’ said Cecil.
‘Mother, Cecil has offered to read to us!’ said Daphne, almost as if Freda were deaf, as well as mad to ignore such an offer.
Freda said, ‘Well, that is very kind, Cecil, whatever you may say. If you’re sure…?’ She herself, of course, had suggested something similar the night before, to get them in from the garden.
‘Perhaps you’ll read us some of your own work?’ Harry said, with a solemn look, to show Cecil that its fame had gone before him.
Cecil smiled and looked down again. ‘Well, Daphne and I hatched this plan, do you see, that everyone would read out their own favourite poem of Tennyson’s.’
‘Goodness, I don’t know,’ said Freda, thinking she couldn’t without her glasses. And Hubert said warmly,
‘Oh no, old chap, we’d much rather listen to you.’
‘Well, if you’d really like that…’ said Cecil, with a clever little show of discomfort.
Freda looked at Daphne, whose own desire to perform for them all seemed sunk in her fascination with Cecil. To a hostess such a reading was potentially awkward, but of course it might turn out to be a triumph and a thing they’d remember for years. Harry had asked for it, and she didn’t want to disappoint him. She had a dread of Harry being bored. She said, ‘Well, then – after dinner…!’ And then, ‘You know we met him, of course…?’
‘Now this will interest you, Cecil,’ said Hubert.
‘Met whom, my dear?’ said Elspeth.
‘Oh, Lord Tennyson. Yes, indeed,’ she said warmly, laying a hand for a minute on Cecil’s sleeve. Cecil smiled courteously at the hand, until after a quick squeeze she took it away. ‘We were on our honeymoon, so it seemed auspicious.’ She looked round the table with the satisfaction of having their attention, but made anxious by George’s expression, his eyebrows raised in mocking indulgence. She felt he was trying to deflect the story which she’d now found a chance to tell. She knew she had a way of telling it, and knew from experience that she was liable to leave something out. ‘It was our honeymoon,’ she repeated, to steady herself; she let her eyes rest speculatively on Harry, as that intriguing word glowed in the candlelight. She didn’t think he’d heard the story before, but she wasn’t completely sure. ‘We went to the Isle of Wight – Frank said he wanted to take me over the water!’
‘Very typical of him,’ said Hubert, with a fond shake of the head.
‘You know you go over on the ferry, from… Lynmouth, isn’t it?’
‘Lymington, I believe…’ said Harry.
‘Why do I always get that wrong?’
‘You can go across from Portsmouth too, of course,’ said George; ‘but it’s a little further.’
‘Do let Mother tell the story,’ said Daphne, sounding frustrated equally with the story and the interruptions.
Freda let Harry fill her glass, and took a rich long sip of wine. ‘It must have been the early evening. Have you been on that ferry? It seems to wander over to the Isle of Wight, as if it had all the time in the world! Or perhaps we were just impatient… I remember the Queen was at Osborne, and Frank said he’d seen the Equerry, with the red boxes – everything had to go back and forth on the ferry, of course, it must have been a business for them.’
‘I don’t suppose they minded,’ said Hubert. ‘She was the Queen, after all, and that was their job.’
‘No… probably they didn’t. Anyway – we were sitting inside, as I was feeling rather cold, but Frank was always very curious about ships!’
‘One could say that my father was fascinated by all kinds of transport,’ said Hubert.
‘And Frank said,’ said Freda, ‘would I mind, though it was our honeymoon, if he went outside and had a look round.’
‘And he ran into Tennyson,’ said Cecil, who had leant forward over his plate in a twisted posture of attention.
‘Well, I didn’t know it was him!’ said Freda, rather flustered by Cecil’s narrative economy. ‘You know, Frank always liked to have a talk with the captain and that kind of thing. Well, after a while I looked out and saw him leaning on the rail beside a most extraordinary figure.’
‘I’m sure,’ said Cecil. ‘He must often have been on the ferry, going to Farringford.’
‘Well, I’m sure… But I felt quite alarmed!’ said Freda. And she started, with a faint sense of panic, on the bit of the story she knew best, knew word for word from her earlier tellings: ‘It was a tall old man, even then he was taller than Frank, though I believe he was eighty. I can see him now, he had a cloak on over his clothes and – ’ here she always made large swooping gestures above her head – ‘an extraordinary, very wide hat, and from behind-’
‘A wide-awake hat,’ said George.
‘Yes… and from behind you saw his – ’ – she always dropped her voice – ‘filthy-looking hair. I can see him now. My first thought was he was bothering Frank, you see, I mean that he was a beggar or something! Imagine!’
‘The Poet Laureate of England!’ said Hubert.
‘Well, you know they talked for some time. Apparently the captain had told him we were newly-weds.’ She had another drink of wine, looking at Harry over the glass. Her heart was beating absurdly.
‘And what did they talk about, darling?’ prompted George, with a rather tight smile.
‘Oh, I forget…’
‘Oh dear!’ said Cecil, slumping back as if he’d paid good money for nothing, but also, surprisingly, as if he knew her well enough now to tease her. She laughed at herself and again put her hand for a moment on his sleeve.
‘Lord Tennyson said – I shouldn’t really say.’ She felt a knot of incoherence in her chest.
‘We won’t tell,’ said Elspeth, kindly, but as if to a slightly trying child.
Daphne said loudly, in a gruff and approximately regional voice, ‘He said, “We need more bloody, young man.” ’
‘Really, child…’ said Freda, laughing and flushing.
‘ “Less awfully, young man, more bloody!” ’ boomed Daphne.
‘I can tell you, he was very down-to-earth!’ said Freda.
Cecil laughed now, in his brief, loud way, and mild amusement and relief spread round the table, the laugh in part at the girl’s absurd bit of play-acting.
‘So that was all they got out of that great poet,’ Daphne explained in her normal voice. ‘No occasional verse, just – ’ and here she tucked in her chin again – ‘ “More bloody, young man!” ’
‘Enough, child…!’ said Freda.
‘I suppose one sees what he meant,’ said Harry.
‘He was fed up with fine words by that stage,’ said Hubert, clearly quite proud of this family anecdote, and seeing the interest in it.
‘Poor Frank was a little disconcerted,’ said Freda, feeling uncertainly for the ebbing hilarity, and realizing she’d missed out what Tennyson had said about honeymoons. That too was a little disconcerting, and she thought it best to let it go.
‘No, he could be very blunt,’ said Cecil, splintering a brazil nut in the silver jaws of the nutcracker.
‘Bloody blunt, you might say,’ said George, smirking round.
‘If you can’t be blunt at eighty…’ said Daphne.
‘He could be very blunt indeed,’ said Cecil again, through a mouthful of nut, and a sudden uncouth appearance of being quite drunk. ‘I remember my grandfather saying so – he knew him pretty well, of course.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Freda – it was almost a wail.
‘Oh, Lord, yes,’ said Cecil, his loud emphasis followed by a total loss of interest; his face went blank and heavy and he turned away.
When the ladies withdrew for coffee the dining-room door was firmly closed, but the louder sounds carried across the hall – Cecil’s yap, and now and again the awkward note of Huey’s laughter. One never knew what went on, as they pushed the decanter round; whatever it was, it stayed in the room. All they ever brought in with them afterwards was a sporting sense of solidarity and the comfortable stink of cigars. The women’s team, by contrast, was plainly unfocused and without a strategy.
‘Oh, my dear, goodness…’ said Freda, vaguely motioning Elspeth to a chair.
‘I’ll stand for a while,’ said Elspeth, taking up her coffee cup, declining a liqueur with a tiny shudder, and walking to the end of the room on a brisk inspection of ornaments and pictures. At Mattocks, of course, there was quite an advanced collection of pictures, strange symbolic works of various Continental schools. One glanced around with a degree of apprehension.
‘And you, child?’ said Freda. ‘A little ginger brandy, perhaps?’
‘No, thank you, Mother.’
‘No, indeed!’ said Elspeth.
‘Oh, well,’ said Daphne, ‘perhaps just a small one, Mother, thank you so very much.’
Elspeth was combative, but not easily rattled. She came back across the room and perched on the edge of the window-seat. Straight-backed, smartly but staidly dressed in shades of grey, she had something of Harry’s sharp-eyed handsomeness and, it had to be admitted, coolness. ‘I think your young poet so striking,’ she said.
‘Yes, isn’t he striking,’ said Freda, sipping off the top from a perilously full glass of Cointreau. She sat down carefully. ‘He’s made quite an impression here.’
‘He has charm,’ said Elspeth, ‘but not too much of it.’
‘I find him most charming,’ said Daphne.
Freda glanced at her daughter, who looked flushed and slightly reckless as though she’d already had her drink. She said, with a vague desire to annoy, ‘Daphne finds him charming, but she thinks he speaks too loud.’
‘Oh, Mother!’ said Daphne. ‘That was before I knew him.’
‘He only arrived here last night, my lamb,’ said Freda. ‘None of us knows him at all well, as yet.’
‘Well, I feel I know him,’ said Daphne.
‘One can see that George is very attached to him,’ said Elspeth, ‘in the Cambridge way.’
‘Of course George is devoted to him,’ said Freda. ‘Cecil has done so much for him. Helped him up and, you know, what have you…’
Elspeth took a quick sip of coffee. ‘A touch of hero-worship on George’s part, I would say, wouldn’t you!’
This seemed to put George in a rather foolish light. ‘Oh, George is no fool!’ said Freda. She saw something pleasurable dawn in Daphne’s face, the way, over and over, a child slyly seizes on a new phrase, a new conception.
Daphne said, ‘Oh, I think he does hero-worship him,’ with a frank little shake of the head. A great collective laugh was heard from across the hall, which rather showed up the ladies’ thin attempts at enjoying themselves. ‘I wonder what they’re talking about,’ Daphne said.
‘Best we never know, I think, don’t you,’ said Freda.
‘What would it be, though, that isn’t thought fit for our ears?’ said Daphne.
‘I think that’s a lot of nonsense,’ said Elspeth.
‘What is, dear?’
‘You know,’ said Elspeth.
‘Do you mean they talk about women?’ said Daphne.
‘They must know some very amusing women, in that case,’ said Freda, as another burst of laughter was heard. She had a disquieting sense of Harry, who was always so solemn with her, taking quite another character when the ladies were absent. She said, ‘Frank always said the secret was they didn’t want to bore us, but didn’t mind boring themselves. He always hurried them through. He wanted to get back to the women.’ The thought was intensely poignant.
Daphne said, with a pretence of indifference, ‘Do you have many dinner parties of your own, Miss Hewitt?’
‘At Mattocks? Oh, not a great many, no,’ said Elspeth. ‘Poor Harry is so extremely busy, and of course he’s often away.’
‘So you dine in solitary splendour, poor thing!’ said Freda. ‘In that palace…’
‘I can’t say I mind,’ said Elspeth drily.
‘Among all your marvellous pictures,’ said Daphne, slightly overdoing it, Freda felt. She said,
‘Harry must be doing awfully well…’ But at this Elspeth’s pride seemed to knit up tight and in getting up to return her coffee cup she effectively swept the matter of her brother’s prospects aside. Freda said, artificially, she felt, ‘And your dress, dear, I’ve been wanting to ask – is it from our splendid Madame Claire?’
Elspeth wrinkled her nose in pretended apology – ‘Lucille,’ she said.
‘Ah, well!’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Elspeth, ‘I can’t deny Harry keeps me in fine style.’
‘No, indeed!’ said Freda, with a quickly spreading feeling she’d been put in her place. Of course Elspeth might have been hinting that he would do the same for his wife, but Freda was fairly clear she was saying she hadn’t a chance.
There was the sound of a door opening, and Daphne said, ‘Ah, here come the gentlemen.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Freda, looking up at the group as they reappeared, with their funny discreet smiles. It was as if they had reached a decision, but were not at liberty to reveal what it was. Harry deferred to Cecil in the doorway, and then waited a few moments to defer to Hubert as well: he came in with an arm lightly round his shoulders, as if to thank and reassure him. Huey had drunk more than usual, and had a hot, uncertain look, the host to three men cleverer than himself. ‘Now then…’ he was saying, surely as glad as his father would have been to have got through that part of the evening. ‘Now then, how are we going to do this?’
There was a brief discussion of where Cecil was going to be, and how the chairs should be rearranged. George said wasn’t it frightfully hot in the room, and opened the french windows. ‘Shall we all sit outside?’ said Daphne.
‘Don’t be absurd,’ said Freda. There were hazards enough in the reading as it was. She watched Harry, hoping that in the shunting back of the chairs he would sit by her. He took up a small armchair in a masterful hug, with a pleasant effect of tension in his well-trousered legs as he lifted it out of the way. A rough semi-circle was formed in front of the window. Cecil set a lamp on a small table, actually outside, on the brick path, and a chair beside it. It was a miniature theatre. The lamp lit up the shrubs, the leaning hollyhocks and little lightless Chinese lanterns immediately behind him, but made everything else beyond and above seem the more thickly dark.
‘Since someone so kindly asked,’ said Cecil, with a confident glance at Harry, ‘I’ll read a poem or two of mine before scaling the heights of, er, Mount Tennyson.’ He sat down, with a copy of the Granta held out under the lamp at arm’s length. ‘I hope it won’t seem immodest to read a poem about Corley. The place seems to call poems forth – somehow!’ Varied murmurs of indulgence and respect were heard. Cecil raised his chin, and his eyebrows, and then, as if addressing a gathering, or rather congregation, of a hundred or so people, began: ‘The lights of home! the lights of home! / Clear through a mile of glimmering park, / The glooming woods, the scented loam, / Scarce seen beneath the horse’s feet / As through the Corley woods I beat / My happy pathway through the dark.’ The effect was so far from modest, Cecil chanting the words like a priest, and with so little suggestion of their meaning, that Freda found herself completely at a loss as to what he was talking about. Her eyes went straight to Daphne, who was grinning and blinking with the sudden need to master her feelings. Hubert looked pretty astonished for several seconds, then quickly assumed a cunning frown, as if measuring it against other readings he’d heard. Harry and Elspeth, more truly accustomed to literary soirées, maintained calmly appreciative near-smiles. George had turned so as to look straight into the garden, and his face was hidden; was it just the lamplight that made his ears burn red?
Freda took a furtive fortifying swig from her glass, and smiled approvingly in Cecil’s direction. The same thing always happened when she was read to, even when the reading was a more thoughtful and quiet one: at first she could barely take it in, as if nonplussed by her own concentration; then she settled and focused; then after ten minutes or so it seemed to be going on and on, Cecil’s voice had its own patterns, everyone’s did, that carried on more or less the same up the hills and down the dales of the poems, so that the words themselves all came to seem the same. ‘The footings of the fawn among the fern’ – she saw what he meant, but it made her want to giggle. ‘Love comes not always in by the front door,’ said Cecil, in his most homiletic tone. She let her head fall back and peeped abstractedly at Harry’s profile, stern but fine, and his strong left leg jutting out, jumping unconsciously with his pulse. Had he perhaps been injured, heart-wounded, in some earlier romance? She thought that must be it. One couldn’t imagine adoring him, exactly; but he was rich, and generous with it, she came back to that, his touching sweetness to Hubert: few ‘got’ poor Huey, as Harry did. But there was something difficult about him, no doubt – his singleness was perhaps a warning as much as an invitation. She looked away with a wistful smile. Nothing had been said about the scale of this event; as each probable limit was reached and passed without any remark of surprise or prediction Freda grew restless, and then, the opposite of restless, when she closed her eyes to try and savour the sense and not have actually to look at Cecil, and the warm electric rush of noises, the confident stride of whole new situations with all their pre-existing logic, talking with Miriam Cosgrove on a beach in Cornwall, they had to pack, there was so little time before the train pulled out, and they mistook the way to the hotel, they were hopelessly lost, and then, was it just a silence that had woken her, with its own queer tension, and she sat up and reached again for her empty glass. ‘Perfectly marvellous,’ she muttered, now slightly giddy as well as bleary. She forced herself awake. ‘A memorable evening!’
‘I’ll read you my favourite section,’ said Cecil, and took a preoccupied sip from his tumbler – was it water he was drinking, or whisky? ‘Unwatch’d, the garden bough shall sway – ’
‘Oh, yes, I love this one,’ said Freda, over-compensating; her daughter glanced furiously at her.
‘The tender blossom flutter down – ’
‘Ah…’
‘Unloved, that beech will gather brown, / This maple burn itself away.’ Large gestures of his raised right arm took in the garden beyond him.
Feeling suddenly delightfully awake, Freda smiled round, gave an almost conspiratorial look to Harry, who nodded, very slightly, but pleasantly. Elspeth glanced down, having noticed. It was a beautiful poem, beautiful and sad. ‘Unloved, the sun-flower, shining fair, / Ray round with flames her disk of seed…’ Again she could imagine it more sensitively read – or did she mean less sensitively? – anyway, without a certain atmosphere of Westminster Abbey. Poor Huey was fast asleep; it might have been a great pitiless sermon. She wondered if she could poke him discreetly or otherwise get at him, and felt another giggle hiding in her consternation. Oh, let him sleep. Her other two children, in supporting postures, flanked the stage, George subtly reflecting Cecil’s importance, while Daphne’s silly face was tense with the desire to respond. Freda could tell she wasn’t taking a word of it in.
Unloved, by many a sandy bar,
The brook shall babble down the plain,
At noon or when the lesser wain
Is twisting round the polar star;
and once more Cecil’s long and powerful fingers, commanding their attention, twisted in front of him, throwing his face into dramatic shadow -
Uncared for, gird the windy grove,
And flood the haunts of hern and crake;
Or into silver arrows break
The sailing moon in creek and cove -
here he glanced upwards with a surprising note of comic disadvantage, but carried on determinedly -
Till from the garden and the wild
A fresh association blow,
And year by year the landscape grow
Familiar to the stranger’s child -
the first hesitant drops, like soft footsteps or tactful throat-clearings, had quickly gained confidence, a rush of pattering had begun, and Cecil too, no stranger to the elements, was rushing through, raising his voice just when he needed to bring the poem to rest: he went on emphatically,
As year by year the labourer tills
His wonted glebe, or lops the glades;
And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills -
but now all of them were getting up to move the lamp and close the windows and his last words rose against the settling roar of the rain in a determined shout.
Hubert woke early, with a sharp ache above his left eye, where a number of oppressive thoughts seemed to have gathered and knotted. His pyjamas were twisted and damp with sweat. Social life, though it had its importance, often left him confused and even physically out of sorts. The rain on the roof had got him off to sleep, and then woken him again to his own heat. He had a muddled apprehension of people moving about, his mother had restless nights, and now, as he dozed and woke again, his worries about her wove their way through his uneasy recall of moments at dinner and afterwards. Then the sun rose with merciless brilliance. Like Cecil Valance, Hubert hated to waste time, but unlike Cecil he was sometimes at a loss to know quite what to do with it. He decided he must go to early Communion, and leave the rest of the party to go to Matins without him. Twenty minutes later he closed the front gate and set off down the hill with an air of sulky rectitude. It had turned into a fresh, still morning; the great vale of northern Middlesex lay before him, with the answering heights of Muswell Hill rising mistily beyond, but he searched in vain for his usual sober pleasure in belonging here.
He paid scant attention to the service, conducted by Mr Barstow, the laborious curate; but it gave him a measure of satisfaction to sit in his pew, and to kneel on the hard carpet of the sanctuary steps. Afterwards he walked home through the Priory, and was still quite warm from the climb when he joined the others at breakfast. Cecil was talking, in his trying, amusing way, and though Hubert greeted them all properly, and asked them if they’d slept well, he sensed that Cecil had taken charge.
‘I slept almost troublingly well,’ said Cecil, showing by his frown at his boiled egg that he expected a laugh; then went on where he’d been interrupted, ‘No, I shall leave that to you, if you don’t mind.’
‘You know Cecil’s a pagan, Mother,’ said George.
‘Cecil worships the dawn,’ said Daphne.
‘I see…’ said their mother, with the strained brightness of her early mornings.
Cecil said, ‘I confess I was relieved when Georgie told me Stanmore church was a roofless ruin.’
‘He may not have mentioned,’ said Hubert, ‘but there’s a first-rate new church bang next door to it. I can recommend it.’
‘I think I rather prefer the ruined one,’ said Daphne experimentally.
‘Really, child,’ said her mother, pouring tea into her cup with a wandering hand. ‘Well, we will have to go without you.’
‘Oh…!’
‘Cecil, I mean, not you.’
‘You know we had rather hoped to show you off to the village,’ said George.
‘Daphne will repeat the sermon for you over lunch,’ said his mother.
‘And what will Cecil do while we’re at church?’ asked Daphne.
Cecil gave a hesitant smile, and then rather mumbled, ‘Oh, I expect I’ll have a look at a poem.’
‘There,’ said Daphne; and George too looked vindicated.
Hubert, feeling a little queasy, poured out a cup of coffee and stood up. ‘I hope you won’t mind,’ he said, ‘if I excuse myself,’ and he left the room with the clear feeling that no one did. He crossed the hall and went into his father’s office, and closed the door.
My dear Harry [he wrote]
I will certainly take the cigarette-case in to Kinsley’s & have your name put on it – I think not in my writing, which as one wit remarked looks like a man’s attempt at knitting!
He looked gloomily out of the little leaded casement, that was half-obscured by leaves; and went on,
You were a bit upset with me last night Harry, and I’m not sure you were being altogether fair. I’m afraid I always rather shun demonstrations of affection between men.
Here he paused again, and then, with a firmness belied by his flinching expression, inserted ‘and dislike’ after ‘shun’; he turned his full stop into a comma, and went on:
as being unmanly, and ‘aesthetic’. I know the rest of the Sawle clan are more that way, but it has never been in my nature. You know no one ever had a better friend than you, Harry old boy. I should not have told you about our situation, it is not ‘desperate’ by any means, and I hope we manage pretty well. We are not yet ‘mortgaged to the last sod’ as you put it! But the small comforts of life make all the difference, whatever anyone says. I am not the demonstrative sort Harry, as you must know by now, but we are all very grateful.
Hubert sat back and smoothed his moustache down over his mouth in vexation. He felt his letter wasn’t going well. He looked briefly at the photograph of his father that hung above the bookcase, and wondered if he had ever had to deal with a similar problem. It was very hard, when you did get a friend, who was so ready to help, and then this happened. And then not knowing exactly what it was that was happening. He felt he must say something before Harry took him out for a run to St Albans in the car. Still not sure if he would actually send the letter, he closed it anyway, with a touch of coolness, ‘Yours ever Hubert.’ Remembering an idea he had had, which he hoped might not offend Harry, and might even be thought to have a certain elegance, he added: ‘PS, I wondered last night whether a simple H might not do just as well, on the cigarette-case, as standing for us both – ’
Then he thought he’d better start the whole letter again.
They left the garden through the front gate and went up the lane towards the Common, Cecil instinctively leading the way. ‘So what did you really do while we were flopping and droning?’ said George. He’d found the hour at church, away from Cecil, unexpectedly painful.
‘Oh, much the same,’ said Cecil. ‘I flopped on the lawn; and I droned to the parlour-maid.’
‘Little Veronica?’
‘Poor child, yes. We assessed the chances of a war with Germany.’
‘I’m sure she was a fund of pertinent views.’
‘She seemed to think it was on the cards.’
‘Oh, dear!’
‘I fear little Veronica is rather smitten with me.’
‘Darling Cecil, not everyone at “Two Acres” is in love with you, you know,’ said George, and smiled with private satisfaction and a hint of mistrust. He did wonder if Cecil hadn’t been almost too much of a success.
‘She’s an attractive young girl,’ said Cecil, in his most reasonable tone.
‘Is she?’
‘Well, to me.’ Cecil gave him a bland smile. ‘But then I don’t share your fastidious horror at the mere idea of a cunt.’
‘No, indeed,’ said George drily, though a blush quickly followed. His face was hot and stiff. He saw how easily Cecil could spoil the walk, the day, the weekend altogether, if he wanted to, with his airy aggressions. ‘She is only sixteen,’ he said.
‘Exactly,’ said Cecil, but relented, and put his arm through George’s, and pulled him to him tightly as they strode along. ‘Weren’t you possessed by the wickedest thoughts when you were sixteen?’
‘I never had a wicked thought at all till I met you,’ said George. ‘Or at least until I saw you, staring at me so brazenly, and longingly, across the lawn.’ This was a favourite scene or theme for both of them, their little myth of origins, its artificiality a part of its erotic charm. ‘Little did I know that one day you would be my Father.’ Here they were by Miss Nichols’s cottage. George straightened himself, knowing they would be seen, but not sure what impression he wanted to create. He felt a half-hearted desire to startle Miss Nichols, but in the event merely raised his hat and shook it in a feebly cavalier way.
‘You looked so perfectly… suitable,’ said Cecil, with a sudden drop of the arm and quick sharp squeeze of George’s bottom.
‘Is that what you call it?’ said George, wriggling free and looking quickly round.
‘I wouldn’t say your brother Hubert was particularly suitable.’
‘No,’ said George firmly.
‘Though one can’t help being just a little in love with his moustache.’
‘Don’t go on about it,’ said George. ‘You’re only saying it because I said Dudley had splendid legs. I’m not sure anyone’s ever admired poor Hubert. Besides, he’s a womanizer through and through.’ And they both laughed like mad again, and somehow amorously, at the silliness of their slang. George felt a wave of happiness rise through him. Then Cecil said,
‘I’m afraid you’re wrong about that, though.’
‘About what?’
Cecil glanced round. ‘I would say your brother Hubert has one very ardent admirer – in the person of Mr Harry Hewitt.’
‘What, Harry? Don’t be idiotic. Harry’s after my mother.’
‘I know that’s the idea. Your sister’s worried sick about it. But I promise you she needn’t be.’
‘I don’t know what’s put this into your head.’
‘Well, there’s his taste in art – you know, he told me the sort of thing he collects. But mainly, I must admit, there’s his tendency to manhandle your brother on every possible occasion.’
‘Does he?’ said George, with a frown of repudiation but also of dull recognition. ‘He’s certainly very generous to him.’
‘My dear, the man must be the most arrant sodomite in Harrow.’
‘A large claim!’ said George, sparring a little for time.
‘I just happened to catch an extraordinary moment, after dinner, when I’ll swear the old monster tried to kiss him in the inglenook. They didn’t know I could see them. Poor Hubert was most frightfully put out.’
George gasped and laughed. ‘You call him old,’ he said, ‘though I believe he’s not yet forty.’ The Cecil-type shock of this, the lightly brutal worldliness, brought its own little train of resistance, concession and in this case amusing relief. Cecil was always right. And of course there was something perversely delightful in the situation. It was only later that he saw the hazard to his mother. ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered,’ he said.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cecil, and gave him an odd hard look, as though he thought him a fool. Now they were passing the gryphon-capped gate-piers of Stanmore Hall, a mansion almost as imposing as Corley Court; Cecil glanced in across the lawns, but if he had any feelings of curiosity he repressed them. He was smooth and unseeing after his little triumph about Harry. The Sawles barely knew the Hadleighs; their friends in the top end of the village were Mrs Wye, who took in sewing, and the Cattos, who bred show-birds in a straggle of huts and runs behind their cottage – people dear to George since childhood, but useless and even embarrassing for present purposes. He saw the deeply familiar paths and pavements, trees, walls and white-railed fences with renewed alertness, half-loving and half-critical, and longed for Cecil, with his poet’s eye, to give them his blessing.
‘Well, this is the first pond,’ he said, pulling him up by the muddy slipway where a small wild girl in a cloth hat was submerging a toy boat.
Cecil looked across the circle of brown water and green duckweed with a pursed, absent smile. ‘I don’t think even I could take my clothes off here,’ he said, ‘right next to these people’s cottages, and so on.’
‘Oh, we’re not swimming here,’ said George. ‘I’ve got somewhere much more pretty, and indeed private, in mind for that.’
‘Have you, Georgie?’ said Cecil, with a mixture of fondness and sauciness, and suspicion, since he liked to make the plans himself.
‘I have. There are three ponds here; I dare say the village lads will be swimming in the big one, beyond those trees, if you’d like to have a look at them…?’
Cecil peered pityingly at the little girl, who was perhaps too young to think sailing better than sinking; while the wooden block of the boat kept bobbing up and the sodden triangle of sail struggled to right itself. ‘As it happens,’ he said, distantly, ‘I only want to look at you,’ and then turned to smile at George, so that the remark seemed to have curved in the air, to have set out towards some more obvious and perhaps deserving target, and then swooped wonderfully home.
They went on across the open field towards the woods, no longer arm in arm, Cecil again a little ahead, in his habitual fashion, so that the lovely certainty of a minute before seemed vaguely called in question. The tiny separation felt to George like a foretaste of what would happen next morning. He planned to go down to the station in the van with Cecil, but was flustered and miserable already when he tried to picture it, there would be no time, no chance… Really everything rode on this last afternoon. ‘Wait for me!’ he said.
Cecil slowed and turned and smiled so widely and yet so privately that George felt almost faint with reassurance. ‘I hardly can wait,’ Cecil said, and kept smiling; then they went on, side by side, with a funny tongue-tied singleness of purpose. George was aware of his own breathing, his own pulse, as the ragged line of oaks rose up in front of them. His feelings absorbed him so completely that he seemed to float towards them, weak with excitement, across a purely symbolic landscape. Away to their right a middle-aged couple whom he didn’t recognize were also approaching the woods, with a pair of snuffling and bickering spaniels. He took them in exactly, but with no sense of their reality. The woman wore a bright blue blouse, and a low brown hat with a feather in it; the man, in country flannels, had a button-topped cap like Cecil’s, and raised his stick in amiable greeting. George nodded and quickened his pace, in a rush of guilt and exultation. He would easily be able to avoid these people. Other walkers were so predictable. There was a riding trail that ran for a mile or more along the wood’s edge; and other tracks led on from glade to glade across the whole breadth of the Common. Thinner pathways, under lower branches, had been made by the deer. George ducked in through one of these, a tight green tunnel through the oak and beech saplings, and Cecil was obliged to follow, with an odd sort of cough of surrender. ‘I can tell you know the way,’ he said.
The truth was that George had played in these woods for years, with his brother and sister, but just as often, since he was big enough, alone. There were half-a-dozen tall trees he had worked out, through long hours of held breath and anxious daring, how to climb without help; there were hiding places and burial places. To show them to Cecil was to admit to something very far from Cambridge, and the Society. He stood up in the small clearing at the tunnel’s end, and reached back to help Cecil and get in his way as he came up behind him.
Cecil stifled his usual yelp of a laugh and patted George’s side and held his forearm in a tight grip, to keep him at a distance but not to let him go. He seemed to be listening, his head raised and eyes warily sliding, his posture self-conscious. They heard the dogs barking and bothering each other, close by. For a second or two the blue of the woman’s blouse could be seen among the leaves, and the man called out ‘Mary! Mary!’, which George thought was the woman’s name but then she called it too. There was something unaccountably funny about a dog called Mary, perhaps it was after the Queen, and he giggled to himself as he stood, with his arm burning from Cecil’s grip; though that was nothing to the tantalized ache in the back of his thighs and the thick of his chest at Cecil’s muscular closeness, his shushing lips, the blatant evidence of his arousal. George was breathing half-forgetfully, in sighs, while his heart raced. They heard the dogs yelping again, a bit further off, and the notes, though not the words, of the couple talking, the strange flat tone of marriage. Cecil took a few cautious steps across the leafy floor, still gripping George at arm’s length, peering round. They were very close to the wood’s edge – below the green translucent fringe of beech leaves you could see the open field. Still, Cecil was being a little absurd – if Mary’s owners thought of them at all it would be their silence that puzzled them, their abrupt disappearance that seemed queer.
‘Let’s go a bit further,’ said Cecil. George sighed and followed behind him, rubbing his wrist with an air of grievance. He saw that this little mime of prudence, air of woodcraft, had just been Cecil’s way of getting on top and taking control of a scene which George for once had planned. Well, they were dreams as much as plans, memories mixed up with wild ideas for things they’d not yet done, perhaps could never do. Cecil, under other circumstances, was bold to the point of recklessness. George let him go ahead, pushing springy branches aside, barely bothering to hold them back for his friend, as if he could look after himself. It was all so new, the pleasure flecked with its opposite, with little hurts and contradictions that came to seem as much a part of love as the clear gaze of acceptance. He watched Cecil’s back, the loose grey linen jacket, dark curls twisting out under the brim of his cap, with a momentary sense of following a stranger. He couldn’t think what to say, his yearning coloured with apprehension, since Cecil was demanding and at times almost violent. Now they’d emerged by the huge fallen oak that George could have led him to by a much quicker path. It had come down in the storms several winters ago and he had watched it sink over time on the shattered branches beneath it, like a great gnarled monster protractedly lying down, bedding down in its own rot and wreckage. Cecil stopped and shrugged with pleasure, slipped off his jacket and hung it on the upraised claw above him. Then he turned and reached out his hands impatiently.
‘That was very good,’ muttered Cecil, already standing up – then walking off for a few paces as he roughly straightened his clothes. He stood looking over the low dense screen of brambles, smiled mildly at a squirrel, cricked his neck both sides, ran a hand through his hair. He had a way of distancing himself at once, and seemed almost to counter the bleak little minute of irrational sadness by pretending that nothing had happened. His words might have followed a merely adequate meal, his thoughts already on something more important. He squared his shoulders, smiled and snuffled. The squirrel twitched its brown tail, scrabbled up its branch, watched him again. Perhaps it had watched his whole performance. It seemed to be applauding, with its tiny hands. George, still lying in the leaves, watched them both. He was amazed each time by Cecil’s detachment, unsure if it was a virtue or a lack. Perhaps Cecil thought it rather poor form of George to be so shaken by the experience. The tender comedy of George’s recovery, the invalidish wince and protesting groan at his ravishment, were ignored. Once in college he had been back at his desk within a minute, with a paper to finish, and seemed almost vexed when he turned a while later to find George still lying there, as he was now, spent but tender, and longing for the patient touch and simple smile of shared knowledge.
‘Funny little creature,’ said Cecil whimsically.
‘Oh… thank you,’ said George.
‘Not you,’ said Cecil, raising his chin and mimicking the rodent’s spasms of nibbling.
George gave a rueful laugh, and sat forward with his hands round his knees. He wanted Cecil to know how he felt, but he feared that what he felt was wrong; and even so, to tell him would be to praise him, since he had produced this wild effect in him. ‘Help me up, sir,’ he said.
Cecil came back and took his raised hands and pulled him up. And he wasn’t so distant – they kissed, for a second or two, long enough for reassurance but not to get anything started again.
The streams ran down at two or three places in the woods, threading and pooling and dropping again, among the huge roots of the oaks. They were hardly noisy, you came on them by surprise, just when you heard their busy trickling. They brought down leaves that caught and gathered on twigs and roots to make little grey-gold dams, with clear pools behind them. At a low point, by the wood’s edge, two streams ran into one behind the dike of a fallen tree, silted and half-submerged, and made a bigger pond; in high summer it could be too shallow for bathing, but the recent rains had filled it up again.
‘The lowest pond is deeper than it looks,’ said George.
‘Aha…’ said Cecil.
‘If you want to have a dip…?’ He felt he shouldn’t show how much he wanted him naked again, and then he would get it. The weekend so far had been hobbled and hampered by dropped trousers and half-unbuttoned shirts.
‘You go first, and report on conditions,’ Cecil said.
George gave him a sideways smile, ready but a little disappointed. ‘All right,’ he said; and he started to unlace his shoes.
‘Do it slowly,’ said Cecil. ‘And keep looking at me.’ He went over to the great oak above the pond, scanning its twisted and bulbous trunk for footholds, then in five seconds scrambled up to the low landing where it divided, and eased himself out on his bottom a short way along a broad almost horizontal branch. He sat there, suddenly owning the wood as much as George had believed himself to do. ‘I can see you,’ he said.
‘And I can see you,’ said George, unbuttoning the top of his shirt and then pulling it over his head.
‘I said slowly,’ said Cecil.
George was slower, accordingly, when it came to his trousers. He found a certain shyness clouding his desire to please. Cecil maintained a provoking half-smile, arousal masked in amusement. ‘You’re like some shy sylvan creature,’ he said, ‘unused to the prying eyes of men. Perhaps you’re a hamadryad.’
‘Hamadryads are female,’ said George, ‘which I think you can see I’m not.’
‘I still can’t really see. You look a bit like a hamadryad to me. I expect you live in this oak tree I’m sitting in.’
George folded his trousers loosely and laid them on an old stump; but he turned away to slip off his white drawers, and saw with a twinge of regret that they were stained with mud from the tussle ten minutes earlier. ‘Oh, you are shy,’ said Cecil, almost crossly. George glanced over his shoulder, and forgot his anxiety about the mud in the larger strangeness of his nakedness, in the dappled woods, where any other walker could see him, and with Cecil, in his shirt and trousers and shoes, watching him steadily. He stepped down carefully across the dead leaves and oak mast towards the loose ellipse of water. The day was warm, but in and out of the patchy sunlight he shivered at the air on his back. He saw he was excited by the part he was playing, the new little scene of obedience, in which none the less his own worth and beauty were enhanced. It was something to know you were what Cecil wanted more than anything. He crouched down, still with his back to him, and peered into the water, which was brownish, loamy, stirred gently and continuously by the little rill that fell into it. Sunlight sparkled on the far side, twenty feet away. He slid a leg through the cold surface, and at once, when he felt the gripping chill of the water, flung himself in too. He circled and steadied and gasped out, ‘It’s delicious!’
After that it was his turn to watch Cecil, a readier and more practised undresser. Cecil’s way was just to be out of his things with a tug and a wiggle and a kick. He pranced down the leafy slope like a satyr, sun-burnt and sinewy, calves and forearms darkly hairy. Then he leapt into the little pond almost on top of George, drowned him for a second or two, their legs tangling violently as George gripped at him, frightened and excited. He wanted to calm Cecil and keep him. They circled each other, spitting out water, laughing, the surface settling and bubbling. Underneath, their feet kicked branches, stirred up leaves and slime. Cecil reached for him, had an arm round his shoulder, then closed with him inexorably underwater.
They lay out to dry for a few last minutes at the edge of the wood, where the sun shone in under the high fringe of leaves. The field beyond had already been ploughed, and the tussocky grass of the headland was faded and trampled. The small stream that trickled down from the pool where they’d swum ran away behind them through a long ditch thick with brambles, its noise hardly louder than the miscellaneous birdsong. George had put his drawers back on, but Cecil spread out still naked, raised on his elbows, frowning lightly at his own body. George loved the confident display, and was vaguely, half-pleasurably, alarmed by it; he thought of the spaniel called Mary, and looked across the curve of the wood’s edge half-expecting to see the blue blouse and hear the dry chatter of the couple on the breeze. He looked back almost shyly at Cecil – he felt he would never stop taking him in. He loved the beautiful rightness of his bearing, that everyone saw, and he loved all the things that fell short of beauty, or redefined it, things generally hidden, the freckled shoulders swollen with muscle, knees knotty with sinew, black body-hair streaked flat, dark blemishes of the summer’s mosquito-bites fading on his arms and neck. Behind him rose the dim pillars and dappled shadow of the woodlands, ‘the Common’, which to George was the magical landscape of his own solitude. This was the man who had entered it, unaware of its secrets: he had quickly surveyed it and possessed it; now here he was, stretched out full length in front of it. Here he was, rolling over with an absent-minded stare and settling on top of him, twitching experimentally as he squashed him, big trickles of cold water running suddenly off his hair into George’s wincing and gasping face.
It was the hat that he saw first, over Cecil’s shoulder, while his friend moved rhythmically on top of him: red and white, distant, but clearly on the move, above the bracken, where the woodland curved out round the far edge of the field. ‘No, no…!’ – he tried to draw up his knees, pushed at Cecil with his fists, tried to twist and topple him.
‘No…?’ said Cecil, sneering and panting in his face.
‘No, don’t, Cess – no! Stop!’ – jerking his head up to see more clearly.
‘Yes…?’ said Cecil, more rakishly now.
‘It’s my sister – coming down the path.’
‘Oh, Christ…’ said Cecil, slumping, then rolling off him pretty smartly. ‘Has she seen us?’
‘I don’t know… I don’t think so.’ George sat up and rolled over at the same time, reaching for his trousers. Cecil’s own clothes were further off, and required a quick soldier-like scramble, white buttocks wriggling through the grass.
‘No harm in a sun-bath, is there?’ he said. ‘Where is she?’ For the moment the red hat had disappeared. He pulled on his silk drawers, and then sat back, insouciant, but flushed and still notably excited.
‘Best get your trousers on,’ said George.
‘Just been having a bathe…’ said Cecil.
‘Even so…’ said George sharply, the sense of a very tricky moment still thick about him.
‘A bit of a rough-house…?’ Cecil smirked at him. ‘And anyway, what was it? – only a bit of Oxford Style, Georgie, hardly the real thing.’
‘Trousers!’ said George.
Cecil tutted, but said, ‘Well, perhaps you’re right. We can’t have your sister exposed to my membrum virile.’
‘I feel a gentleman would have put that the other way round,’ said George.
‘What can you mean?’ said Cecil. ‘I’m a gentleman to the tip of my… toes’ – and he pulled on his trousers crouchingly, peering across the undergrowth. ‘I can’t see the darned girl,’ he said.
‘It was definitely her. She has a hat I would know half a mile off.’
‘What, a sort of sou’wester?’
‘It’s a red straw hat, with a white silk flower on the side.’
‘It sounds frightful.’
‘Well, she likes it. And the main thing is it shows up.’
‘If she does, you mean…’
George was trying and re-trying various phrases in his head – buttoning his shirt he ran through facial expressions suggestive of bafflement and surprise at his sister’s questions. ‘Well, perhaps she didn’t see us…’ he said, after a minute.
Cecil looked at him narrowly. ‘You didn’t invent this sighting of your sister, did you, Georgie, just to put me off a bit of Oxford with you? Because you know that sort of trick never, ever works.’
‘No, my darling Cess, I did not,’ with momentary anger. ‘For heaven’s sake, I’m losing you tomorrow, I want as much of you as… as I can manage.’
‘Well… good,’ said Cecil, faintly abashed, standing up and stretching, then reaching down again to help him up.
When they were back in their shoes and jackets, Cecil said, ‘Allow me,’ and as he kissed him quickly on the lips he snatched off their two hats and switched them round, cocking George’s boater on his own damp curly head, and whisking his green tweed cap on to George’s bigger, rounder bonce – it perched there in a way he clearly found amusing. They scrambled up, past the pond, the little trickling stream, its noise quickly lost. George started talking quite loudly about College matters, virtually nonsense, but as they regained the path they had caught the stride of two friends out walking, with the woods to themselves. When they spotted Daphne, it was clear that in her solitary way she was doing the same, pretending to be merely out for some air, but hoping above all to find them and tag along. She knew enough not to search for them openly. Where the path she had been following crossed their own she turned down demurely towards them, red hat among the bushes, like a girl in a fairytale. George felt furious with her, but felt also the need for exceptional tact. Something in her demeanour told him that she hadn’t seen them in the grass. Cecil called out, ‘Daphne!’ and waved pleasantly. Daphne looked up in surely genuine surprise, waved back, and hurried towards them. ‘What do you think?’ muttered Cecil.
‘I think we’re fine,’ said George. ‘Anyway, she knows nothing about these things.’ His anxiety was not that she’d have known what they were doing, but that in her general astonishing innocence she wouldn’t have had the first idea. He saw her talking to their mother about it, and their mother taking a colder and cannier guess.
‘Miss Sawle…!’ said Cecil, raising his borrowed boater as she approached.
‘Daphne!’ said George and touched the peak of Cecil’s cap, with a facetious smile.
Daphne stopped three yards off and looked at them. ‘This is nice,’ she said. ‘There’s something funny about you.’
‘Oh…’ – the two boys gaped comically at each other, patted themselves, George tense with worry that something else funny might show. Surely Cecil’s whole person glowed with unmentionable lust; but Daphne simply gaped back at him, and then looked away in the warm uncertainty of being teased. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ she said. It was very strange, and in its way reassuring, that she couldn’t work out the obvious thing.
‘What an exceptionally pretty hat, if I may say so,’ said Cecil, as they started back together up the path.
Daphne looked up at him with an idiotic smile. ‘Oh, thank you, Cecil!’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And as they walked on: ‘Yes, I’ve received any number of compliments on this hat.’
To George it was entirely irksome having Daphne with them for the walk home – twenty minutes that he and Cecil might have spent alone. He wondered what further chances they would have before the van came in the morning. After supper, perhaps, they might slip outside for a cigar. And of course they could start very early indeed and walk to the station, and Jonah could go in the van with Cecil’s bags. He thought intently about how to propose these arrangements, only sharing in the chatter with a tone of wan good cheer. Wherever they paused to let one another go ahead through a gap in the undergrowth George patted Cecil, and sometimes Cecil abstractedly patted him back. Soon they left the woods by a different path, and then they were out in the lane… a high load of straw creaking past on a wagon, a motor-car caught behind it, banging and fuming. It seemed to him Cecil was taking quite unnecessary interest in Daphne, bending to her, shielding her as they scooted past the smelly car; but he had a picture too of his own silly jealousy, scuffing along behind this comical couple, the tall dark athlete with his ears curled outwards by an oversized boater and the little girl in a bright red hat trotting eagerly beside him.
And there, already, was the steep red roof of ‘Two Acres’, the low wall, the front gate, the row of dark-leaved cherry-trees outside the dining-room window. The front door stood open, in the summer way, into the shadowy hall. Beyond it, the garden door too stood open, the afternoon light glinting softly on polished oak, a china bowl – one could pass right through the house, like a breeze. Over the door was the nailed-up horseshoe, and beneath it the old palm cross. George felt the unseen jostling of different magics, varying systems of good luck. It was something extraordinary they were doing, he and Cecil, a mad vertiginous adventure. On the hall-stand hung Hubert’s irreproachable bowler, and their father’s old billycock hat that was always left there, as if he might return or, having returned, feel the need to go out again. Cecil looked round, with George’s boater in his hand, and tossed it with a slight spin through the air so that it landed on a free peg. ‘Ha!’ he said, with a little smirk of satisfaction at George and at himself. George found his hand was trembling as he hung up Cecil’s cap beside it.
‘Cecil, you’ve performed a miracle,’ said Daphne.
‘My dear girl…’ said Cecil complacently.
‘You’ve turned water into wine.’
‘Well,’ murmured Hubert, with a quick glance at his mother, ‘a special occasion.’
‘We not infrequently have wine on Sunday,’ said George.
‘A very sad occasion,’ said their mother, shaking her head as she raised her glass. ‘We can’t have Cecil drinking water on his last night with us. Whatever would he think.’
‘I should think you jolly insensitive,’ said Cecil, knocking back his glass of hock.
‘Indeed!’ said Daphne, who was still forced to keep their normal Sunday commons. Sunday was Cook’s night off, and they had sat down to a bare supper of jellied chicken and salad. They had given up the festive style, there was a sense of looking ahead – after the champagne and Tennyson of their earlier dinners, the table tonight seemed tactfully to prepare them for the prose of Monday morning.
‘Yes, we’ll be sorry to see you go, old chap,’ said George.
‘Such a pity…’ said his mother, with an uncertain little smile at Daphne.
Daphne in turn peered at George, who did look oddly wretched – she knew the way his face went stiff with feeling, just as she knew his irritable frown when he found he was being stared at. ‘You’ll be back in Cambridge in a fortnight,’ she said.
‘Oh, I think we’ll get by,’ said Cecil absently.
Daphne said, ‘I mean, George is all right, but we won’t see Cecil for ages, perhaps never again!’
Cecil seemed pleased by this histrionic claim, and his dark eyes held hers as he laughed, and said, ‘You must come to Cambridge too. Mustn’t she, Georgie?’
‘Oh, rather…’ said George dully.
‘Hmm…’ said Daphne.
‘No, of course you must,’ said George in a sincere tone; though she knew that George didn’t want her in Cambridge, ‘tagging along’, breaking in on his important discussions with Cecil, and all the other things she was prone to do.
‘You might all come up for the French play,’ said Cecil.
‘I suppose so,’ said Daphne, though she felt she heard in this general invitation a note that she hadn’t suspected before, the note of a general boredom.
‘What are you doing?’ said her mother.
‘The Dom Juan of Molière,’ said Cecil, as if it was something they all knew well. Daphne knew enough to know what it was about – a lady’s man – a womanizer, in fact! ‘I’m taking Sganarelle – rather a fine part, though of course a great deal to learn.’
‘It’s in French, you know,’ said George, which if it was meant to put his sister off was fairly effective.
‘I see,’ said Daphne. ‘I’m not sure I’d be able to follow a whole play in French.’ She hardly thought it worth it just to watch Cecil prancing around, with a cloak and sword, probably. But at once she had a pang at the thought of missing it.
‘How marvellous,’ said her mother graciously, excusing herself as well.
A little later Cecil said to George, as if the others weren’t there, ‘I’ll have to get ahead with my paper on Havelock this week,’ so that Daphne had a clear sense that he had already left them, might even have preferred to go today, after lunch.
When supper was over, George was sent round to the Cosgroves’ on some mission he clearly thought beneath him, Hubert claimed he had letters to write, and their mother, trailing into the drawing-room, paused, raised a finger, and went out again. Cecil and Daphne were left for a minute on the hearth-rug. Daphne saw this as the threshold to the grownup end of the evening, with social requirements she wasn’t quite sure of.
‘I don’t suppose you want to hear the gramophone,’ she said. She had a sense of opportunity, made more incoherent by her new fear of boring Cecil.
‘Not specially,’ he said, casually but kindly, with a smile she hadn’t seen before, a candid gape that slightly startled her, and was probably a Cambridge thing: it was hard to work out, but at Cambridge it seemed it was almost a sign of respect to be disrespectful, to say just what you felt at any time. Well, candour was their watchword! Cecil was fingering in his waistcoat pocket, then brought out his little clipper. He said, ‘I wonder if Miss Sawle would care to keep me company while I enjoy my cigar?’
‘Oh, yes!’ said Daphne. ‘Oh, I’ll get a coat,’ and she ran to the cloakroom under the stairs. It was such an exciting idea that there were bound to be strenuous arguments against it. But that was part of Cecil’s atmosphere and appeal. She came back, not with her own dull coat, but with one of George’s old tweed jackets round her shoulders. She liked the air of improvisation, a man’s jacket seemed to show she was up for a lark, and to carry some chivalrous hint of her need for protection. ‘It’s a little bit smelly,’ she said; though she hardly imagined that would worry Cecil.
‘Well, I’m going to make a smell too.’
‘Well, quite.’
‘I may be being too sensitive,’ said Cecil, glancing towards the door. ‘The General’s so down on smoke, at home we all sneak off to the smoking-room. She’s made it into quite a guilty pleasure.’
‘No, no,’ said Daphne.
Cecil drew out a cigar case from a surprising pocket. ‘I’ve got two, if you’re tempted to try again,’ he said, and uncapped the stiff leather sheath to show her the tops of them. They made her think of soldiers, or the cartridges in Hubert’s rifle. She saw it might be wittier not to answer, and he seemed amused by her condescending smile. She knew she should call to her mother, but sighed just to think of the objections, and followed Cecil out into the garden, leaving the french window ajar.
It was quite a bit colder than last night, though she was not going to mention it. She said, ‘Cecil, I think I shall always associate In Memoriam with you!’
‘Well…’ – Cecil was fussing with a lighted match and making impatient appreciative noises as he drew on the cigar. Then the newly conjured smoke was all around them.
‘Shall we sit here?’
‘Let’s walk on,’ said Cecil, moving her along past the windows of the sitting-room. ‘We’ll see what the stars are up to, shall we?’
‘All right,’ said Daphne, and as he crooked his arm she reached up to slip her hand through it. As well as everything else, there was something entirely proper about Cecil; he perhaps wasn’t even aware of her happy sense of play-acting, her toss of the head in the dark as she took his arm. Then George’s jacket, merely slung round her shoulders, slipped off.
‘Here, let me help you.’ In the gloom on the edge of the lawn Cecil held the coat and patted her shoulders when she’d got it on.
‘I must look like a tramp,’ she said, her hands covered by the sleeves, silky linings cold for a moment on bare arms, the weight and smell of the thing hugged round her.
‘Do it up,’ said Cecil, his cigar between his teeth. And again his large hands seemed to take care of her, to be larger and more capable than ever. Then he offered his arm once more.
They went on a few leisurely paces, Daphne happily self-conscious, Cecil a touch reserved, though she wasn’t sure of his face, and perhaps he was merely working out the stars. She wondered if he was thinking of the hammock again – and was embarrassed to think of it herself after what had happened. She knew he’d had three or four glasses of wine; decisions would come easily to him, though to a sober person they might seem whimsical and delayed. She looked up, above the silhouette of the tree-tops. ‘I fear it’s too cloudy tonight, Cecil,’ she said.
Cecil huffed out another cloud of rich, sour smoke, and cackled vaguely. ‘Were you in the woods for long this afternoon?’ he said.
‘This afternoon, oh, not really.’
‘You didn’t get much of a walk.’
‘Well, when I met you I came home, of course.’
She felt him press her arm more tightly against his side, and the beautiful grown-up presence of Cecil, his height and his muscular warmth under evening dress, and even his voice, which she’d once thought so cutting and grand, slightly turned her head. ‘It must have been someone else we saw earlier on. I said to Georgie, “Isn’t that Daph?” but by the time he looked whoever it was had gone.’
‘Well, it could have been. Did you call?’
‘You know, I wasn’t sure.’
‘Lots of people do walk there.’
‘Of course,’ said Cecil. ‘Anyway, you didn’t see us.’
Daphne felt again she was missing something, but was carried along by the excitement of making conversation, and squeezed his arm reassuringly. ‘I would have said hello if I had.’
‘I thought you would.’
‘To be honest, it’s George. He doesn’t want me tagging along.’
Cecil made a low disparaging murmur, and they turned round. ‘You can see a bit better now,’ he said. ‘There’s the famous rockery!’
‘I know…’ She felt he was still rather mocking the rockery, and it emboldened her. ‘Cecil,’ she said, ‘when may I come to Corley?’
‘Mm…? To Corley?’ – it was as though he’d never heard of such a place, and certainly had no memory of his earlier invitation. Then he laughed. ‘My dear girl, whenever you like.’
‘Oh… thank you.’
‘Whenever you like…’ he said again, expanding into his decision in a tone which seemed oddly to undermine it. ‘I suppose it won’t be till the Christmas vac now, will it, probably.’
This seemed as good as never to Daphne. ‘No, I suppose.’
‘Get Georgie to bring you over.’
They moved on, towards the dark outline of the rockery, which at night might truly have been taken for a greater and more distant outcrop. Daphne said, huskily casual, ‘I imagine I could come by myself.’
‘Would your mother allow that?’
‘I am quite grown up, you know,’ said Daphne.
Cecil said nothing. He pressed forward with his usual confidence; she thought she should say, ‘There’s a step there’ – she half-yelled it as he stumbled and lurched down hard on his right leg, caught himself but pulled her with him, and then lurched again to save her and grip her.
‘Oh Christ, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine…!’ – wincing where he’d trodden heavily on the edge of her foot.
‘Whenever we go out, we seem to end up taking a tumble, don’t we!’
‘I know!’
‘And now I’ve lost my dratted cigar.’
They were face to face, her heart still lively from the shock, and he put his arms round her waist and pulled her against him, so that she had to turn her cheek to his cold lapel. He moved a hand up and down on her back, over the warm tweed of George’s jacket. ‘Blasted steps…’ he said.
‘I’m all right,’ said Daphne. She rather dreaded looking at her shoe, when they got in, but Cecil was at a disadvantage, and she knew at once that he could never be blamed for anything. She said quietly, ‘I can’t think how those steps got there;’ then went one better, ‘Those bloody steps!’
Cecil gave a sigh of a laugh across her hair. ‘Oh child, child…’ he said, with a softness and a sadness she had never heard before, even from her mother. ‘What are we going to do?’
Daphne eased herself a fraction freer. She wanted to play her part, felt the privilege of Cecil’s attention, it was awfully nice being held so tightly by him, but there was something in his tone that worried her. ‘Well, I suppose you’re going to have to pack.’
‘Hah…’ said Cecil, again with a strange despairing note, like his poetry voice.
‘I think… shall we go back in?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Can you keep a secret, Daph?’
‘As a rule,’ said Daphne.
‘Let’s keep this a secret.’
‘All right.’ She wasn’t sure if she understood. Falling over a step wasn’t much of a secret, but Cecil was clearly embarrassed by it.
His hands relaxed slightly, and travelled down almost to her bottom as he smiled and murmured, ‘You know, it’s been splendid getting to know you.’
‘Oh… well…’ she said, somehow paralysed by his hands. ‘That’s what we’re all saying about you. There’s never been anything like it!’
He bent his head and kissed her on the forehead, like sending her to bed, but then the tip of his nose moved down her cheek and he kissed her beside her mouth, in his cigar breath, and then, completely without expression, on her lips. ‘There,’ he said.
‘Cecil, don’t be silly,’ she said, ‘you’ve been drinking,’ and he tilted his face sideways and pushed his open mouth over hers, and worked his tongue against her teeth in a quite idiotic and unpleasant way. She pushed herself half-free of him; she was alarmed but kept her composure, even laughed rather sarcastically.
‘You don’t mind if I kiss you?’ said Cecil dreamily.
‘I don’t call that kissing, Cecil!’ she said.
‘Mm…?’ said Cecil. ‘What would you call kissing, then, Daphne?’ his tone dopy and mocking, slightly annoyed, tugging her back into his grasp like a dancer with a mere flourish of his suddenly inescapable strength. ‘More something like this?’ – and he started again, just darting his lips all over her face, like a tormenting game, allowing her to dodge and turn her head a little but holding her so tightly about the waist that she was quite hurt by the hard shape of the cigar case in his trouser pocket thrusting against her stomach. She found she was giggling, in quick shallow breaths, and before she could help it they’d turned into hot little sobs, and then a hushed wail of childlike surrender and failure.
‘Hello…?’ It was George, back from the Cosgroves’, coming to look for them, surely? Childish timid relief mixed almost at once with pride. But no, it was Huey, in a funny voice, apologetic but actually rather cross. ‘I say…’
Cecil loosened his grip, sighed acceptingly, though the little snigger he gave her seemed to say he hadn’t given up. He looked round, over the top of the bushes, to see who it was, perhaps he too thought it was George, and again she felt the special subject of her own secret with Cecil. They both had to be careful, she’d been frightened by him, but she still had a sense that he would know what to do. ‘We’re over here,’ she said, her voice clotted with crying.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I fell down the blasted step,’ said Cecil in a drawl. ‘I seem to have trodden on your sister.’
Hubert stood there, in silhouette, conveying an indignant but undecided impression. ‘Can you walk?’ he said, very distinctly, as though speaking over the telephone.
‘Of course I can walk, we’re just coming in.’
‘It’s really a bit dark for rambling round,’ Hubert said.
‘That was the point,’ said Cecil. ‘We were studying the stars.’
Hubert peered upwards doubtfully. ‘It’s a bit cloudy for that,’ he said, and turned back to the house.
Daphne lay first on one side, then on the other side, tired out by her thoughts and kept alert by them too. Her right foot throbbed impressively in evidence, and was already bruising.
Sometimes she drifted sideways into near-unconsciousness, but woke at once with a sprint of the heart at the thought of Cecil’s closeness, his strength and his breath. His body was exceptionally hard, his breath warm, moist and bitter.
Cecil was drunk, of course, she’d seen two bottles of wine emptied at dinner, the hock it was, with the black German lettering. Daphne knew what drink did to people, and after Friday night, and her own tipsy episode with the ginger brandy, she knew something more about the strange freedoms of drinkers. They were intriguing, but unnecessary, and the truth was they were generally somewhat revolting. Afterwards one didn’t talk about them, out of the vague sense of shame that attached to them. One sobered up. Cecil would surely have a headache in the morning, but he would get over it. Her mother was often absurd at bedtime, but perfectly sensible again by breakfast. It would probably be a mistake to make too much of it.
And yet the whole thing showed Cecil in a very poor light, or half-light… so much of their dealings had happened in the dark, and if she saw him at all it was by the glow of a cigar end or the faint glimmer of the suburban night. When he’d come he’d put them all on their mettle by his sheer distinction, his cutting voice, his cleverness and money. And now, as she rolled on to her other side in excited despair of ever sleeping, she wondered just what George would say if he were told the extraordinary unwholesome thing his friend had tried to do. And she went through it all in her mind again, in the order it had happened, to savour the shock of it properly.
Well, she wasn’t naïve, she knew perfectly well that the upper classes could behave appallingly. Perhaps George should be told what his precious friend was really like. Though perhaps she would keep it to herself, with the choice then of bringing out the facts on some later occasion. It soon seemed more adult not to make a fuss. She started thinking about Lord Pettifer in The Silver Charger, and her mind chasing and confirming and losing the story in the vivid fragments of memory she wandered off through lighted rooms into the welcoming jabber of dreams but then almost grunted herself awake, and lurched at once into a seventh or eighth rehearsal of her own story, in the garden with Cecil Valance.
With each retelling, the story, with its kernel of scandal, made her heart race a fraction less, and its imagined impact on George, or her mother, or Olive Watkins, their fury and bewilderment, grew stronger in compensation. Daphne felt the warm flood of the story surge through her and grip her whole person; but each time the wave seemed a little weaker than the time before, and her reasonable relief at this gradual change was coloured with a tinge of indignation.
Or could that be what kissing was really about? It seemed more like some childish dare, to stick your tongue into someone else’s mouth, and took a good deal of forbearance on their part, even if they liked you a lot. Alas there was no one she could ask. If she brought it up with her mother she would instantly grow suspicious. Could Hubert conceivably have kissed a woman like that? Maybe George, if he did have a girl, had had a go at it. She imagined asking him, and the secret fact of it having happened with his best friend made the idea slyly amusing.
What she was almost conscious of not thinking of was the way he had rubbed himself rhythmically against her. All her feelings were fixed on the easier, and after all rather comic, liberties of licking her mouth and feeling her bottom.
Later she found she had slept, and the dream she had just come out of kept its magic as she lay with open eyes in the deep grey dark. Then she thought she had been a silly child before. ‘Child, child’ he had called her, and that’s what she was. She thought about what Cecil had actually said, how it had been so wonderful getting to know her, and she flopped on to her back and wondered quite coolly if he had fallen in love with her. She gazed at the shadowy zone of the ceiling, the first powdery gleam of light above the curtains, as a sort of image of her own innocence. What evidence was there? Cecil had a very particular way of looking at her, even when others were present, of holding her eye at moments in their talk, so that another unspoken conversation seemed also to be going on. She had never known such a thing before, the boldness and the absolute privateness as well. It was still rather awful that Cecil had gone behind George’s back like that, but she felt a certain thrilled complacency at the choice he had secretly made. And of course he had to do it like this, his love had to be concealed, and it had to come out. There was something very touching as well as alarming in Cecil’s passion. Now she leapt forgivingly over the muddle in the garden, and thought of the life they would share together. Would he want to do that kind of thing again? Not when they were married, presumably. And another perspective of lighted spaces opened before her: she saw herself sitting down to dinner beneath the jelly-mould domes, or anyway compartments, of Corley Court.
She slept unusually late, slept on with only a momentary murmur and swallow through the rustling and bumping on the landing, the fact of voices downstairs; and when she at last came up into fuddled life her little clock said a quarter to nine. After that, and a further helpless three minutes of gaping sleep, she found she had attuned to something, to the loss of something she was amazed to find she had already grown used to, the noise of Cecil in the house. Of course he had gone! There was a thinness in the air that told her, in the tone of the morning, the texture of the servants’ movements and fragments of talk. And all her plans for him were thwarted, the witty thing she was going to say to him, as he climbed into Horner’s van… It would be weeks, perhaps months, before she saw him again. Moaning with a lover’s pangs, as well as with a certain sulky relief at this tragic postponement, she thrust herself out of bed, and on to her instantly tender right foot.
In the thick of her solitary breakfast, with the maid looking in once a minute to see if she’d finished, there was George coming past the window, back home from the station and seeing Cecil off. He had a bleak, faraway look which annoyed her the moment she saw it and felt its meaning. It was a time of reckoning for him – his guest, his first one ever, had left, and now the family could take him back and tell him, more or less, what they thought. He would be moody and delicate, unsure who to side with. And then she remembered her book. Oh, what had Cecil done with it? Had he written in it? Where had he put it? She was suddenly sick with anger at Jonah for packing it with Cecil’s other books. Even now it would be trapped unbeknownst between other books in his suitcase, in a crowd of other cases on Harrow and Wealdstone station.
‘Oh, Veronica,’ she said.
‘Sorry, miss!’ said Veronica.
‘No, not that,’ said Daphne. ‘Did you see, did Mr Valance leave anything for me, my autograph book, I mean?’
‘Oh, no, miss.’ And knotting her duster in a pretence of interest, ‘Is that the one with the vicar in?’
‘What…?’ said Daphne. ‘Well, it has a number of important men in it.’ She didn’t quite trust Veronica, who was more or less her own age, and treated her more or less like a fool.
‘I’ll ask, miss, shall I?’ Veronica said. But then George looked round the door, gave a rueful smile, and said,
‘Cecil says goodbye.’ He hovered there, feeling the atmosphere, seeming uncertain whether to share the subject of Cecil any further with his sister.
‘I’m afraid I slept somewhat badly,’ said Daphne, aware of her own adult tone. ‘And then I must have overslept…’
‘He was up fearfully early,’ said George. ‘You know Cecil!’
‘Perhaps Mr George has got it, miss,’ said Veronica.
‘Oh, really, it doesn’t matter,’ said Daphne, and coloured at the disclosure of her private worry.
‘Got what?’ said George, with an anxious look of his own.
So Daphne had to say to him, ‘I wondered if Cecil had found a chance to write in my little album, that’s all.’
‘I expect he wrote something or other. Cess is rarely at a loss for words.’
‘I expect he’s left it somewhere,’ Daphne said, and spread some butter on her toast, though really her smothered anxiety had squeezed up her appetite to nothing. She looked at her brother with a cold smile. ‘So what are you doing today, George?’ she said, conscious of denying him a talk on the obvious subject.
‘Eh? Oh, I’ll find something,’ he said, with a hint of pathos. He was leaning against the doorpost, neither in nor out, the maid sidling past him back into the hall. Daphne saw him decide to speak, and as he started airily, ‘No, it was a shame Cecil couldn’t stay longer…’ she said. ‘I’ve invited Olive for tea tomorrow, I haven’t seen her since they got back from Dawlish.’ She knew Olive Watkins was small beer after Cecil, and Dawlish after the Dolomites, and she felt ashamed and almost sad as well as defiant in mentioning her. But she couldn’t indulge George in his present mood. It rubbed up too closely against her own.
‘Oh, have you…’ said George, startled and bored. Daphne saw she’d produced a particular kind of family atmosphere, and that itself was depressing after the wider horizons of Cecil’s visit. Also, she really wanted her book back, to show Olive whatever it was that Cecil had written. This had been her main purpose in asking her to tea.
Then Veronica, with her own bored persistence, looked back in and said, ‘I asked Jonah, miss. He’s having a look.’
‘Thank you,’ said Daphne, feeling oppressed now by the public nature of the search.
‘Jonah’s looking in his room now. I mean he’s looking in Mr Valance’s room!’
And George, without saying anything more, drifted away, and then Daphne heard him going, rather stealthily she thought, upstairs as well, two at a time. She told herself, without fully believing it, that probably, after all, Cecil would have put nothing but his name and the date.
A minute later George came back down, with Jonah at his heels, and Daphne’s mauve album open in his hands. ‘My word, sis…’ he said abstractedly, turning the page and continuing to read; ‘he’s certainly done you proud!’
‘What is it?’ said Daphne, pushing back her chair but determined to keep her dignity, almost to seem indifferent. Not just his name, then: she could see it was much, much more – now that the book was here, open, in the room, she felt quite frightened at the thought of what might come out of it.
‘The gentleman left it in the room,’ said Jonah, looking from one to the other of them.
‘Yes, thank you,’ said Daphne. George was blinking slowly and softly biting his lower lip in concentration. He might have been pondering how to break some rather awkward news to her, as he came and sat down across from her, placing the book on the table, then turning the pages back to start again. ‘Well, when you’ve finished,’ Daphne said tartly, but also with reluctant respect. What Cecil had written was poetry, which took longer to read, and his handwriting wasn’t of the clearest.
‘Goodness,’ said George, and looked up at her with a firm little smile. ‘I think you should feel thoroughly flattered.’
‘Oh, really?’ said Daphne. ‘Should I?’ It seemed George was determined to master the poem and its secrets before he let her see a word of it.
‘No, this is quite something,’ he said, shaking his head as he ran back over it. ‘You’re going to have to let me copy this out for myself.’
Daphne drained her teacup completely, folded her napkin, glanced across at the two servants, who were smiling stupidly at the successful retrieval of the book, and also formed a somewhat inhibiting audience to this agitating crisis in her life, and then said, as lightly as she could, ‘Don’t be such a tease, George, let me see.’ Of course it was a tease, the latest of thousands, but it was more than that, and she knew resentfully that George couldn’t help it.
‘Sorry, old girl,’ he said, and sat back at last, and slid the album towards her.
‘Thank you!’ said Daphne.
‘If you could see your face,’ said George.
She pushed her plate aside – ‘Will you take all this, please,’ to the maid; who did so, with gaping slowness, peering at the columns of Cecil’s black script as though they confirmed a rather dubious opinion she’d formed of him. ‘Thank you,’ said Daphne again sharply; and frowned and coloured, unable to take in a word of the poem. She had to find out at once what George meant, that she should be flattered. Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not, or George would have said something more. The harder she looked at it, the less she knew. Well, it was called, simply, ‘Two Acres’, and it ran on over five pages, both sides of the paper – she flicked back and forth.
‘Formally, it’s rather simple,’ said George, ‘for Cecil.’
‘Well, quite,’ said Daphne.
‘Just regular tetrameter couplets.’
‘That will be all,’ said Daphne, and waited while Veronica and Jonah went off. Really they were most irritating. She flicked further back for a moment, to the Revd Barstow, with his scholarly flourish, ‘B. A. Dunelm’; and then forward to Cecil, who had broken all the rules of an autograph book with his enormous entry, and made everyone else look so feeble and dutiful. It was unmannerly, and she wasn’t sure if she resented it or admired it. His writing grew smaller and faster as it sloped down the page. On the first page the bottom line turned up sideways at the end to fit in – ‘Chaunticleer’, she read, which was a definite poetry word, though she wasn’t precisely sure of its meaning.
‘I suppose he’ll be publishing it somewhere,’ said George, ‘the Westminster Review or somewhere.’
‘Do you think?’ said Daphne, as levelly as she could, but with a quick strong feeling that the poem was hers after all. Cecil hadn’t just written it here, in her book, by chance. She was still trying to see if it said things about her personally, or if it was simply about the house – and the garden:
The Jenny nettle by the wall,
That some the Devil’s Play-thing call -
that was a conversation she’d had with him – now quite simply turned into poetry. Her father had called stinging nettles Devil’s Play-things, it was what they called them in Devon. She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered, at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph. What else would be revealed?
The book left out beneath the trees,
Read over backwards by the breeze.
The spinney where the lisping larches
Kiss overhead in silver arches
And in their shadows lovers too
Might kiss and tell their secrets through.
Again the minutely staggered and then breathtaking merging of word, image and fact. She was really going to have to read this somewhere apart, in private. ‘I think it would be most appropriate to read this in the garden,’ she said, getting up and feeling very slightly sick; but just then her mother appeared in the doorway, with her heavy morning face, and her bright morning manner. In fact her manner was flustered; there was something behind her smile. Word must already have got through. Beyond her Veronica loitered, the informer.
‘Well, child…!’ her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. ‘What excitements.’
‘Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,’ said Daphne. ‘People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.’
‘Well, of course, dear,’ said her mother, going round the table and opening a window as if to show she had other useful things to do; and then, ‘You’ve obviously made quite an impression… on him’ – not using Cecil’s name, out of some awful delicacy. She gave Daphne a teasing glance that had something new to it – a sense of girding herself for some welcome parental obligation.
‘Mother, he was only here for three nights,’ said George, almost crossly. ‘All Cecil has done, with his customary generosity, is to write a poem about our house as a thank-you for the visit.’
‘I know, dear,’ said their mother, with a little flinch at her two prickly children. ‘He’s been most generous to Jonah too.’
George got up, and went to the window, and looked out in the manner of someone who wants to say something firm but difficult. ‘The poem’s really nothing to do with Daphne.’
‘Isn’t it?’ said Daphne, shaking her head. Wasn’t it? It was there, she had seen it at once, the lovers’ kiss in the shadows, telling their secrets; but of course she couldn’t say that to either of them. ‘I suppose I should be sorry he didn’t write a poem for you.’
George’s pitying look was focused on the cherry-trees outside. ‘As a matter of fact, he has written a poem for me.’
‘Oh, George, you never said,’ said their mother. ‘You mean just now?’
‘No, no – last term sometime – it really doesn’t matter.’
‘Well!’ said their mother, trying to maintain a tone of bewildered amusement. ‘Rather a fuss about a poem.’
‘There’s no fuss, darling,’ said George, now in a brightly patient tone.
‘It’s too lovely to have a poem written for you at all, in my view.’
‘I quite agree!’ said Daphne, and the feeling that everything was being spoiled welled up inside her.
‘I’m beginning to feel very sorry that I mentioned it. If Cecil’s visit has to end in this kind of childish bickering.’
‘Oh, read it if you want to!’ said Daphne, pursing her lips against tears, and flapping through the book to give it to her open at the right page. Her mother looked at her sharply, and after a moment, and quite gently, took it from her.
‘Thank you… now if the girl could run for my glasses.’ And when Veronica came back, their mother sat down at the dining-table and addressed herself, with a quizzical but sporting look, to the poem that had just been written about her house.